Angel of Darkness
‘I expect you would, cara,’ Angelo held her fast when she attempted to coolly pull free, ‘since tacky little foolish experiences undoubtedly litter your past,’ he incised with succinct derision, watching the blossoming of pink highlight her exquisite face. ‘But I do not intend to feature on such a list.’
Kelda was trembling with rage. She yanked her arm free. ‘Sorry, caro...you’re already on it,’ she spelt out like a spitting cat.
‘Are you scared?’ Angelo drawled lethally. ‘Are you scared of the response you give me?’
She could still feel his fingerprints on her skin. Her mouth felt swollen, her breasts tender, her body almost frighteningly alien to her. And she looked at him and her chest went tight. Angelo emanated power in a forcefield of energy. He was one hundred per cent in control. Nothing she had yet said had even angered him.
‘Why should I be?’ She blessed the mask of indifference she had learnt to assume on demand for the camera, for deep down inside she was sick and squirming at the necessity of the hard-bitten act he was forcing her to assume. ‘Did you think you were somehow different from the others, Angelo? Do you think I gave you something more than I gave them? That’s your ego talking,’ she asserted with a scornful little smile on her wide, generous mouth. ‘You’re good...but you’re not so good that I want to repeat the experience.’
He had gone white beneath his naturally dark complexion. Hooded eyes of black ice surveyed her and every nerve-cell in her quivering body tensed. Raw threat had tasted the atmosphere. Every scrap of playfulness had been wiped from his clenched, hard features. She could feel the violence in him. Inches below the civilised veneer dwelt the naked predator as wild as any animal, and she had always known that, known that Angelo’s savage self-discipline and seething intelligence alone controlled that side of his temperament.
She had called up the devil in him, but he had given her no choice. Better to deal with Angelo as the hostile enemy she knew best than as the passionate lover he had proved to be. That Angelo she did not feel equipped to deal with. She stood her ground, hanging on to her faintly amused smile with rigorous determination. It was over now. He would leave her alone. Angelo, chased by her sex practically from the edge of the cradle, would not continue his pursuit in receipt of such a scathing rejection.
‘Have you anything else to add?’ His wine-dark voice trickled like the gypsy’s curse down her taut spinal cord.
‘Angelo,’ she sighed, shrugging a shoulder, ‘you know what I’m like. I like variety—’
‘You’re a whore,’ he breathed in a raking undertone of suppressed and seething rage. ‘You disgust me.’
Disturbingly, the brutal admission stabbed like a knife into her. A sudden haze of moisture interrupted her vision of him, brightening her green eyes to luminescence. But she stared him down, only dimly registering that she was shaking all over, her legs like cotton wool supports.
‘And to think that you excited me so much that I took no precautions,’ Angelo drawled between gritted teeth, shooting her a look of such savage loathing that she was pinned there like a butterfly to a specimen board. ‘I hope I do not live to regret the omission.’
As the door slammed on his exit, Kelda stared at the space where he had been with stunned eyes and parted lips. He had said...he had said he had not used contraception and he was afraid that he might live to regret it! Kelda was ingloriously sick in the bathroom, her body’s response to the horrendous scene she had forced. Only then did the tears come, slow and painful as thorns being plucked from her flesh, and what was worst was that she really didn’t know why she was crying.
CHAPTER SIX
‘WE’RE dining with Tomaso and Daisy this evening...’
Kelda threw her head up from the English newspaper she had been doggedly studying. Her fiery mane of curls flew in all directions. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Angelo dealt her a look of black-ice warning. ‘I said that I would bring you with me—’
‘An ambitious guy, aren’t you?’ Kelda snaked back at him, her eyes awash with disbelief behind the screen of her dark glasses. She had had to force herself to come down and join him for breakfast. He would have read a request for a tray in her room as weakness. Since she had been unforgivably weak in other departments, she could not fall short of her own expectations yet again. For that reason, she was seated here in the courtyard, struggling to swallow food that threatened to choke her and make no pointless comment concerning the passport and wallet which she had discovered by her plate.
‘I have no intention of permitting the conflict between us to damage their relationship—’
‘And when was this cosy little arrangement made?’ Kelda breathed shakily.
‘Before you left London. Your mother said that you wouldn’t come—’
‘She was right!’
‘I said that you would...and you will,’ Angelo swore with an emphasis that was disturbingly chilling. ‘We will arrive together and we will leave together. We will be polite and pleasant to each other in their company—’
‘Bloody hell!’ Kelda gasped inelegantly, too disconcerted by this unlikely vision to conceal her reaction.
‘Polite and pleasant,’ Angelo repeated drily. ‘Your mother’s fears will then be put to rest. Your feelings will cease to be a matter of concern to her—’
‘I’m not playing happy families for your benefit!’ Kelda bit out.
Dear lord, she was thinking sickly, he had planned the evening even before she’d arrived in Italy. He had promised her mother what must have seemed the impossible and he had never doubted that he could deliver. Her blood ran cold.
‘Y
our life will be a living hell if you don’t, I promise you that.’
The husky deepening of his rich vowel sounds made the hair prickle at the nape of her neck. Accidentally she clashed with hard dark eyes, bottomless as a well shaft to the unwary. Her sensitive stomach turned over. She bent her head. She would have gone, no matter what he did or said. But Angelo would never believe that. He seemed to think that she had a malicious need to damage their parents’ relationship.