Angel of Darkness

‘Midnight when?’ she muttered gruffly, removing her dazed eyes from him to conceal her consternation.

‘Yesterday you were arrested,’ he filled in obligingly, and settled a laden tray down on the wildly tossed bed.

They had slept and made love through an entire day. It didn’t seem real. She couldn’t believe it had happened. Her...and Angelo. A fight and an explosion of passion that had overruled every intelligent thought.

‘Are you not hungry?’

He looked so cool. That inflamed her. She had to bite at her tongue to silence it before she impulsively spoke her mind. And what could she say? He was lounging on the end of her bed as though he belonged there. His strong jawline was no longer blue-shadowed. His hair was still damp from a shower. He was immaculately clad in an Armani sweater and black designer jeans. He took her breath away. Drop-dead gorgeous and deadly.

Self-preservation uppermost, she reached for the tray. Steak and a Caesar salad.

‘It’s the one meal I can make,’ Angelo drawled with mocking self-deprecation.

‘The only one you can be bothered to make, you mean,’ she translated without hesitation, but inwardly astonished that he should have gone to that amount of effort for anyone other than himself.

‘Why should I cook when I can afford to pay other people to do it?’

Why the blazes were they talking about the contents of her plate? It was impossible that Angelo could be feeling as awkward as she did. Angelo was no stranger to the intimacy of the bedroom. The morning after could hold no discomfiture for a male of his experience. But she refused to show her own desperately seesawing emotions. She chewed every piece of steak at least forty-seven times. As long as she was eating, he couldn’t expect conversation, and all the while she was engaged in coping with the stark reality of the past twenty-four hours.

Why? Why Angelo? How could Angelo make her lose control to this extent when other men, even men she had liked and respected, left her cold? At eighteen, he had awakened her sensuality and she had buried that discovery deep. And whether she liked it or not there were ties between them that until now she had refused to recognise. From thirteen to seventeen, until that final year he’d spent abroad, Angelo had been the dominant male in her life. Sh

e knew Angelo on levels that she took for granted.

She had forgotten nothing in six years. She knew that he could not abide disorder or unpunctuality, she knew that he loved fast cars...and, discreetly, even faster women. She knew that he positively thrived on the pressure of wheeling and dealing on the international money-market. And she knew so many little things too.

His shirts were specially made for him in Hong Kong. She knew what size socks he wore because she had given him socks Christmas after Christmas in lurid colours she was well aware that he would never wear. She knew he had to shave twice a day. She knew he still kept the horse he had loved as a teenager in the ritziest stable in the block. She knew that he had perfect white teeth, had never had a filling but went a whiter shade of pale at the prospect of his six-monthly dental check-up...

And that knowledge made Angelo seem dangerously familiar. But they were only superficial things, she reminded herself painfully. Furthermore, her previous acquaintance with Angelo had been formed when she was a child and he had been an adult, who stood over her in a position of trust. Was it that awareness which had made it so difficult for her to believe that Angelo would actually hurt her? For, if that was true, if that was to be her excuse, she had never been more wrong about anything in her life.

Angelo skated a brown forefinger over the back of her hand. ‘Are you usually this quiet?’

‘Without eight full hours of rest and three regular meals...yes,’ she dismissed and resisted the urge to jerk her hand out of reach.

Pride demanded that she protect herself. Angelo despised her and yet she had gone to bed with him. Not just once either. She had fallen off the bandwagon into an orgy which not the most self-deceiving argument could excuse. Her sexual infatuation had made a victim out of her but it didn’t have to be that way...no, it didn’t, she told herself fierily. She was no man’s victim.

It had happened. Wishing it hadn’t would change nothing. Angelo had not realised that he was her first lover and she was ferociously grateful for the fact. She could not have borne the humiliation of Angelo knowing that he had proved to be the one male the Iceberg found irresistible. Better that Angelo should think that he was no more special than any other man her name had been linked with...as it was, Angelo looked so bloody triumphant that her teeth ground together.

‘I need a shower,’ she said abruptly, and viewed him expectantly.

‘With company,’ Angelo attached smoothly, viewing her with brilliant dark eyes that devoured.

She lowered her lashes in shock. Every bone and muscle in her body ached. He was an insatiable lover but she had naturally assumed that he was currently at bay. He had actually woken her up and fed her to sustain her through another session of torrid sex. Her stomach quivered with nausea. ‘Forget it,’ she said tartly.

‘I can’t,’ Angelo confided in a husky murmur. ‘I let you sleep as long as I could but I can’t forget that in a few hours we’ll be on separate flights back to London.’

She had forgotten that. The reminder was timely and she embraced it with enormous relief. It was over. She could live with that. It was over and she could return home and, if not forget it had ever happened, at least forgive herself. Her sexual infatuation had been exorcised, she told herself. She had surrendered once to her basic instincts and now, she was effectively cured and free...

‘And there we must necessarily practise greater discretion,’ Angelo pointed out silkily but she could hear the cool menace of steel in the assurance. ‘Your mother would be needlessly distressed by our affair.’

‘We’re not having an affair,’ Kelda told him in a stifled undertone of distaste as she reached for her robe, thrust her arms into it and sprang off the bed.

Angelo closed a lean hand on her wrist before she could brush past him. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what we are having?’

‘In the future...nothing,’ she spelt out, emerald eyes colliding furiously with impassive gold. ‘What we had? A one-night stand. A little tacky, a little foolish, but that’s all.’

Beautifully shaped brown fingers moved caressingly on the tender skin above her wrist. ‘I have never had a one-night stand in my life.’

‘I find that very hard to credit!’