Читать книгу The Winter Bride - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 5

‘A RISE…YOU’RE ACTUALLY asking us for a rise?’ Claudia looked at the younger woman with shocked and incredulous eyes, much as if the girl had asked for a half-share in the house. ‘I think we’re more than generous as it is. You have your salary as well as free board and lodging, and do please remember that we’re keeping two of you!’

Although Angie was severely embarrassed by that response, she forced herself to continue. ‘I often work six days a week and I baby-sit several nights as well…’

Her persistence fired angry colour in the elegant brunette’s cheeks. ‘I can’t believe that we’re even having this conversation. You do some housework and you mind the children. Why shouldn’t you baby-sit? You have to sit in every night to look after Jake…surely you’re not expecting us to pay extra for what you’d be doing anyway? I don’t know how you can be so ungrateful after all we’ve done for you—’

‘I’m just finding it very hard to make ends meet,’ Angie slotted in tightly, a deep sense of humiliation creeping over her.

‘Well, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re doing with your salary when you have all your bills paid for you,’ her employer retorted very drily. ‘What I do know is that my husband, George, will be extremely shocked when I tell him about this demand of yours.’

‘It wasn’t a demand,’ Angie countered tensely. ‘It was a request.’

‘Request refused, then,’ Claudia told her sharply as she stalked to the kitchen door. ‘I’m very annoyed about this and very disappointed in you, Angie. You have a really cushy job here. Gosh, I wish someone would pay me to stay home and fill the dishwasher! We treat you and Jake like part of our family. We kept you on when you were pregnant…and let me assure you that not one of our friends would even have considered retaining a pregnant and unmarried au pair in their home!’

Angie said nothing. There was nothing more to say unless she was prepared to risk Claudia’s explosive temper and the threat of dismissal. No au pair worked the hours Angie did. But then she wasn’t an au pair even though Claudia persisted in calling her one. She might have come to the Dickson family in that guise, accepting the equivalent of pocket money in place of a salary, but slowly and surely her hours had crept up until she was doing the full-time job of a housekeeper and childminder. At the time she had been so grateful to still have a roof over her head that she had made no objection.

But then she had been very naive when she was pregnant. She had seen the Dicksons as a temporary staging post, had fondly imagined that once she had her baby she would be able to move on to better-paid employment and build up her life again. But piece by piece that confidence had faded once she appreciated the cost of child care and the even greater cost of renting accommodation in a city as expensive as London. Ultimately it had come down to a choice between continuing to work for the Dicksons and moving out to live on welfare.

‘We’ll say no more about this,’ Claudia murmured graciously from the doorway, well aware that silence meant that she had won. ‘Do you think you could start putting the children in the bath now? It is half past six, and they’re so dreadfully noisy when they get over-tired.’

By the time Angie had got the children to bed it was well after eight, and George and Claudia had long since gone out to dine. Six-year-old Sophia and the four-year-old twins, Benedict and Oscar, were lovely children—very rich in material possessions but pretty much starved of parental attention. Their father was a circuit judge, regularly away from home, and their mother a high-powered businesswoman, who only rarely left her office before seven in the evening.

They had a spacious, beautifully furnished home and a Porsche and a Range Rover, but Claudia was so mean with money that she had had a pay meter installed on the gas fire in Angie’s room over the attached garage. Since the room had no central heating, and had originally been cheaply converted only for the purpose of storage space, it was freezing cold in winter.

The doorbell shrilled while Angie was ensuring that the only part of her son exposed to that chilly air was the crown of his dark, curly head. She tucked the duvet round Jake in a rush and hurtled through the door that connected with the bedroom corridor to race downstairs before the bell could go again and wake Sophia, who was a very light sleeper.

Thrusting back the wild tangle of platinum pale hair that had flown round her anxious face, she pressed the intercom. ‘Who is it?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘Angie…?’

In severe shock, Angie fell back from the intercom. Like sand on silk, and splinteringly, shatteringly sexy, the voice had a husky Greek accent that roughened every vowel sound. It had been over two years since she had heard that masculine drawl and recognition filled her with sheer, blind panic.

The doorbell went again in a short, impatient burst.

‘Please don’t do that…you’ll wake the children!’ Angie gasped into the intercom.

‘Angie…open the door,’ Leo drawled flatly.

‘I—I can’t…I’m not allowed to open it when I’m alone in the house at night,’ Angie muttered with feverish relief in telling the truth. ‘I don’t know what you want or how you found me, and I don’t care. Just go away!’

In answer, Leo hit the doorbell again.

With a groan of frustration, Angie flew out into the porch, wrenched back the curtains, undid the bolts and the chain and dragged open the front door.

‘Thank you,’ Leo responded with icy precision.

Poleaxed by his very presence, Angie gaped at him, her pulse thudding wildly at the foot of her throat. ‘You still can’t come in…’

A winged ebony brow lifted with hauteur. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Involuntarily, Angie gazed up into eyes the colour of a wild and stormy night, and a shiver of shaken reaction ran through her. Leo Demetrios in the flesh. He was standing close enough to touch on the Dicksons’ doorstep, six feet three inches of daunting sophistication and devastating masculinity. Broad shoulders filled out his superbly cut dinner jacket, perfectly tailored black trousers accentuating lean hips and long, long legs. The overhead security light delineated every carved angle of his savagely handsome features and glinted over his thick blue-black hair, but she still couldn’t believe that he was really, genuinely there in front of her.

‘You can’t come in,’ she said again, running damp palms down over her faded jeans.

‘Angie…I wanna drink…I’m thirsty,’ Sophia mumbled sleepily from the stairs.

Angie jumped and spun round to rush back into the dimly lit hall. ‘Go back to bed and I’ll bring you one up…’

Leo stepped into the porch and quietly closed the door. Angie turned again, giving him a dismayed and pleading look, but she didn’t want to speak to him and alert the sleepy Sophia to the presence of a forbidden visitor. Biting her lip in frantic frustration, she left him there and sped into the kitchen to pour a glass of water and took it upstairs. Claudia and George had only gone out for a quick meal and they might be on their way back even now. They would be absolutely outraged if they found her entertaining a strange man in their home.

Her thoughts in complete turmoil as she struggled to understand why Leo should have sought her out, she settled Sophia and started hurriedly down the stairs again. Mercifully, Leo was still standing in the hall. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find him installed on one of the leather sofas in the drawing room. People ran out red carpets when Leo condescended to visit; they didn’t keep him on the doorstep or leave him to hover in the hall. His hugely successful global electronics empire generated immense wealth, and he wielded formidable power and influence in the business world.

Belatedly encountering Leo’s raking and uninhibited scrutiny of her slender but shapely figure, Angie faltered on the last step of the stairs. His spectacular dark, deep-set eyes smouldered as they skimmed up from the surprisingly full thrust of her breasts to strike her own eyes in direct collision. She ran out of breath and mobility simultaneously, throat closing over, heart pounding so suffocatingly fast behind her ribcage that she felt dizzy.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Leo informed her with a sardonic smile.

‘What are you doing here?’ Angie practically whispered, struggling to surmount that momentary loss of concentration and finding it almost impossible until a stark current of foreboding assailed her and her bright blue eyes widened in sudden dismay. ‘Are you here because of my father? Is he ill or something?’

Leo frowned. ‘To my knowledge, Brown is in good health.’

Angie flushed brick-red, utterly mortified by the spurt of fear that had prompted her foolish enquiry. She perfectly understood Leo’s brief look of disconcertion. No doubt it would be a cold day in hell before Leo Demetrios stooped to act as a messenger boy for one of his grandfather’s servants!

In an awkward invitation and sudden revolt against Claudia’s rigid rules, she pressed open the door of the little TV room. ‘We can talk in here,’ she said stiffly, striving desperately for an air of normality.

But oh, dear heaven, that was an impossible challenge with Jake enjoying the sleep of the innocent upstairs and Leo behaving like a coldly polite stranger. Maybe he was afraid that if he was friendly she might throw herself at him again, Angie thought in sudden, cringing horror. Her colour fluctuating wildly, she dropped her head, but cruelly humiliating memories still bombarded her like guided missiles finding an easy target.

She had been foolishly obsessed with Leo for more years than she now cared to recall. And she had not been the sort of dreaming teenager who sat around simply hoping for a miracle to occur. At nineteen, she had plotted and planned like crazy to get her chance with Leo. She had broken every rule in the book to catch him. She had forgotten who he was and who she was in the chase. And, at the end of the day, she had got very much what she had asked for—Leo had dumped her so hard and fast, her head had spun.

The silence pounded and pulsed.

Nervously, Angie glanced up to find Leo watching her again. Involuntarily, she was entrapped, pulses quickening, skin dampening. Colour drenched her complexion. She ran a nervous hand through the long hair falling round her face, and moved her head to toss it back out of her way. Leo’s gaze followed the rippling motion of that cascade of pale, shining strands, increasing her self-consciousness. Then dense black lashes veiled his burnished dark eyes, and his beautifully shaped, sensual mouth hardened again.

‘How did you find out where I lived?’ Angie asked in a jerky rush, because the silence was unbearable. She did not have his nerves of steel and self-discipline.

‘My grandfather asked me to trace you—’

Her fine brows pleated. ‘Wallace?’ she broke in incredulously, referring to his English grandfather whose daughter had married Leo’s father, a Greek shipping magnate.

‘I’m here only to pass on an invitation,’ Leo imparted smoothly. ‘Wallace would like you to spend Christmas with him.’

‘Christmas?’ Angie parroted weakly.

‘He wants to become acquainted with his great-grandson.’

That final, shattering announcement left Angie gaping at him in even deeper shock. Her knees threatening to give way, she groped her passage down into an armchair. Leo knew she had been pregnant? Leo knew that she now had a child? She had never dreamt that Wallace Neville might share that secret with his grandson.

And now Wallace actually wanted to meet Jake? Yet Wallace had forcefully urged her to terminate her pregnancy over two years ago. The news that the butler’s daughter had been impregnated by one of his grandsons had so appalled him, he had been apoplectic with rage. An unapologetic snob with a horror of scandal, he had been eager to facilitate Angie’s departure from Deveraux Court that very same day.

‘Old men feel their mortality.’ Leo’s dark eyes rested unreadably on her stunningly beautiful face. ‘And, frankly, curiosity seems to be killing him. Obviously it will be in your best interests to grovel gratefully in the face of his generosity.’

‘Grovel?’ Angie echoed in complete bewilderment.

Leo’s appraisal became grim, his mouth twisting. ‘I know about the deal you made with Wallace, Angie. I know the whole story.’

Angie stiffened in disbelief, lashes dropping low on fiercely anxious eyes. ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘You know very well what I’m talking about,’ Leo countered steadily.

Her slim fingers closed together and clenched. She studied the carpet until it blurred, her stomach churning with sick apprehension.

‘The thefts, Angie,’ Leo supplied without remorse. ‘Wallace caught you in the act and you confessed.’

Her head flew up, anguish and resentment mingling in her stricken face. ‘He promised that he would never tell anyone!’

She wanted to die right there and then. Wallace had promised, Wallace had promised faithfully—and by ‘anyone’ Angie had meant specifically Leo. She could not bear the knowledge that Leo thought she had been the thief, responsible for stealing several small but valuable objets d’art from Deveraux Court where her father and stepmother both worked and lived.

‘Angie, nothing disappeared after your departure. That fact rather spoke for itself. Wallace had little hope of keeping the identity of the culprit under wraps.’

‘So my father must know as well,’ she mumbled, mortified pain clogging up her vocal cords as she made that final leap in understanding.

‘I’ve never discussed the matter with him,’ Leo retorted crisply.

In all her life, Angie knew she had never tasted greater humiliation. Her shaken eyes stung fiercely. She studied Leo’s hand-stitched Italian leather shoes and hated him for believing and accepting that she had been the thief. And, even more cruelly, throwing that conviction in her face. Was this why he had referred to Jake as if her child were nothing whatsoever to do with him?

Was her supposed dishonesty so offensive that Leo could not bring himself to acknowledge that she was the mother of his child? she asked herself in growing bewilderment. What had Leo said? Wallace wanted to become acquainted with his great-grandson. Had that been Leo’s way of telling her that he himself had no intention of taking the smallest interest in Jake? She found that she couldn’t think straight because nothing Leo had yet said had made any kind of sense to her.

‘I want you to leave,’ Angie confided shakily. ‘I didn’t ask you to come looking for me.’

‘That’s an irrational response and you’ll think better of it within a very short space of time,’ Leo asserted crushingly. ‘Wallace would have called the police if you hadn’t told him that you were pregnant. You were fortunate to escape a prison sentence. Those thefts took place over a long period. They were neither opportunistic nor the result of someone succumbing to sudden temptation.’

Briefly, Angie closed her aching eyes in a spasm of bitter regret. When in the heat of the moment she had confessed to something she hadn’t done, she had been bolstered by the belief that she was protecting someone she loved and that, in any case, she herself had nothing more to lose. After all, she had already lost Leo, had already accepted that she would have to leave Deveraux Court before her condition became obvious. She had been too proud and too devastated by Leo’s rejection to confront him with the consequences of their stolen weekend of passion.

‘Wallace is prepared to overlook the past for the sake of your child,’ Leo continued levelly.

‘My child has a name…and his name is Jake,’ Angie told him thinly.

If possible, Leo’s rawly handsome features set even harder as he ignored that unasked-for piece of information. ‘In your position it would be very foolish to ignore the offer of an olive branch. I believe that Wallace may now be willing to give you financial assistance.’

‘I want nothing from any of you.’ Hotly flushed and deeply chagrined by the assurance, Angie leapt upright again. ‘But I would like to know why Wallace should feel it’s his responsibility to offer me money!’

Diamond-hard dark eyes assailed hers in icy collision. ‘Obviously because his grandson Drew has failed to observe his duty to support you both.’

In stark confusion, Angie froze. How was it Drew’s duty to support her and Jake? And then finally, and most belatedly, comprehension gripped her, only to leave her drowning in bemusement again. Evidently, Leo was under the impression that his cousin, Drew, had fathered her child. How on earth could he think that? How on earth could anyone think that?

Outrage swelled inside Angie until she thought the top of her head might come flying off. In that instant it didn’t matter how such a ludicrous misapprehension had come about. Angie was too infuriated by Leo’s evident opinion of her morals to concern herself with anything else. So, Leo saw her as a thief and a tart. After all, only a fairly promiscuous young woman would have become intimate with both of Wallace’s grandsons within the space of three months. But Leo was clearly quite happy to believe that she had slept with his cousin after sleeping with him, and no doubt was even more content to believe that responsibility for her illegitimate child could be laid at Drew’s door rather than his own.

‘Angie, I didn’t come here to argue with you or to become involved in personal matters which are frankly nothing to do with me,’ Leo drawled in a tone of cool reproof. ‘I’ve issued the invitation on Wallace’s behalf, and I haven’t got the time to wrangle with you—I have a date, and I’m already running very late.’

For a split second, Angie felt as though he had plunged a knife into her ribs and stabbed her to the heart. A date? So the grieving widower was finally back in social circulation… Wow, bully for him! And, naturally, Angie’s sordid personal problems were beneath his notice and wholly devoid of interest to him. Indeed, knowing Leo as she did—brutally candid, highly intelligent and uncontrolled only in bed, she enumerated painfully—he had probably been congratulating himself on a narrow escape from severe embarrassment ever since she’d been exposed as the household thief.

‘Angie…?’ Leo prompted.

She turned round, her perfect features pale and set. As the bitterness rose inside her, it was the most unbearable moment of temptation she had ever experienced. She had a sudden fierce urge to smash Leo’s self-possession, punish him for his deliberate distancing of himself from her predicament and hurt him, as he was hurting her with the humiliating pretence that they had never been anything to each other but casual acquaintances.

His hard, dark features were impatient. ‘Wallace is expecting you to arrive on Thursday. I assume I can give him the assurance that you will be accepting his invitation?’

In the unstable hold of a tidal wave of conflicting emotion, Angie tore her pained eyes from the dark, savage splendour of Leo as he stood there, so effortlessly detached from her. The anger went out of her at that same moment.

‘You’ve just got to be kidding,’ she breathed with a forced and brittle smile. ‘I have no desire to spend Christmas with your grandfather, and I should think he would have even less desire to spend it with me.’

‘I thought you might, at the very least, be tempted by the possibility of a reconciliation with your own family.’

A humourless laugh was dredged from Angie. Reconciliation? He didn’t know what he was talking about. She had never had anything but an uneasy and difficult relationship with her father. Now an unwed mother, and labelled a thief into the bargain, what possible welcome did Leo fondly imagine she would receive?

‘When I walked out of Deveraux Court…’ her throat thickened, making her voice gruff ‘…I knew I would never be walking back. I wasn’t sorry to leave and I don’t want to return even for a visit. That whole phase of my life is behind me now.’

Bold dark eyes scanned her strained profile in exasperation. ‘I suppose it was less than tactful of me to mention the thefts.’

Angie grimaced, willing back tears, determined not to break down in front of him. ‘I would never expect tact or consideration from you,’ she told him helplessly. ‘But I really do object to being patronised. You’re out of your mind if you think I would be willing to go cap in hand to your grandfather like some pathetic charity case! I’ve managed fine on my own.’

The very faintest darkening of colour emphasised the hard slant of Leo’s high cheekbones. ‘You are working as a servant…you always swore that you would never do that.’

Angie flinched, fingernails biting painfully into her palms. Servant. Not for Leo, surrounded from birth by the faceless breed, with the more egalitarian label of ‘domestic staff’. As hot pink scored her complexion, she whirled away from him before she was tempted to slap him for that most undiplomatic reminder. ‘Theos… Only the most stupid and selfish pride could make you refuse so magnanimous an invitation! Wallace could do a great deal for your son. Think of the child. Why should he suffer for your mistakes?’ Leo demanded abrasively. ‘It is your duty as a mother to consider his future.’

A raw ripple of pain and fury sizzled through Angie as she spun back, blue eyes gleaming like sapphires. ‘And what about his father’s duty?’

His wide, sensual mouth twisted. ‘When you got into bed with someone as self-centred and irresponsible as Drew, you must’ve known that you’d be on your own if anything went wrong.’

Leo was angry, Angie registered in surprise. Tension splintered from the fierce cast of his strong features and icy condemnation glittered in his narrowed gaze. Recognising that look for what it was, Angie realised that Leo was not quite as indifferent as he would like to pretend when it came to his conviction that she had leapt into his cousin’s bed so soon after she had succumbed to him. Bitter amusement filled her at the awareness. He hadn’t wanted her but it seemed he hadn’t wanted any other man to want her either.

‘Believe it or not, at the time I thought Jake’s father was as steady as a rock,’ Angie heard herself admit, tongue-in-cheek. ‘I was very much in love with him. In fact I believed he was the very last man likely to leave me in the lurch.’

‘You were only nineteen…what did you know then of men or their motivations?’ Leo’s response was harsh, dismissive, as he glanced with sudden, unconcealed impatience at the thin gold watch on his wrist and strode towards the door. ‘I’m afraid I really do have to leave.’

The abruptness of his exit took Angie by surprise. She sped out after him and by then he was already in the porch. As she opened the door, he stared broodingly down at her and, without warning, time slid dangerously back for Angie and served up a disturbingly intimate memory. Leo…responding with shockingly primal dominance to her flirtation, pinning her down in the meadow grass by the lake and crushing her lips beneath his with an explosive, driving hunger that had just blown her away. Embarrassed heat coiled like a burning, aching taunt low in Angie’s stomach.

A feverish darkness now overlaid the oblique slant of Leo’s cheekbones, but sardonic amusement glittered in his brilliant eyes. He raised a hand and let a long brown forefinger trail gently along the tremulous line of her soft, full mouth, leaving a stunning chain of prickling sensitivity in his wake and sentencing her to shaken stillness. ‘You really are wasted in a domestic role, Angie.’

And then, before she could catch her arrested breath, he swung away, striding out into the night air. ‘Think over what I have said,’ he urged almost carelessly. ‘Wallace is keen to meet the child… I’ll call tomorrow for your answer.’

‘No, don’t. There’s no point. I’ve made up my mind and I don’t need a night’s sleep to consider it,’ Angie told him tightly. ‘In any case, I couldn’t get the time off. The Dicksons have a very busy social calendar over the next ten days, and the house is always full of visitors over Christmas.’

‘Can you really have changed so much?’ Leo murmured lazily. ‘I believed you would walk out of this house like you walked out of my grandfather’s without a backward glance.’

Angie flushed furiously. Naturally Leo had assumed that the prospect of money would make her eagerly snatch at his grandfather’s invitation, but he had miscalculated. Had she? She hadn’t told him that Jake was his—had almost done so in anger, but had ultimately remained silent. Why? At the back of her mind lurked the shameful and mortifying recollection that she had told Leo that it was safe to make love to her that weekend…and she had lied, with both purpose and full knowledge of what she was doing.

From the doorway, she watched numbly as Leo strode towards the sleek black Ferrari parked at a careless angle across the paved frontage of the house. Dimly, she registered that she was trembling; reaction was setting in after the terrible tension, sudden coldness biting into her bones.

Headlights suddenly lit up the front garden. Dredged from her introspection, Angie uttered a soundless groan as George’s Range Rover raked to a halt.

Claudia virtually leapt from the car. ‘What on earth is going on here?’ she demanded, casting Leo, who stood in the shadows, a haughty, questioning look, but aiming her ire at Angie as she stalked towards her.

‘I called with a message for Angie,’ Leo drawled coolly.

‘You let a strange man into the house with my children sleeping upstairs?’ Claudia ranted in furious attack.

‘Darling…’ her less volatile husband said rather loudly. ‘I don’t believe that Mr Demetrios quite qualifies as a strange man.’

‘My father works for Leo,’ Angie said for the sake of brevity. ‘I’ve known him for years.’

Claudia had come to a halt, glancing uncertainly at her husband for guidance. Her tall, thin spouse was calmly shaking hands with Leo. Angrily conscious that she might have made a fool of herself, Claudia gave Angie a filthy look. ‘We’ll discuss this matter in private.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed now,’ Angie replied with quiet dignity. ‘Leo kept on ringing the bell. I had to let him in.’

She climbed the stairs, conscious that she had no hope of ultimately escaping one of Claudia’s bossy lectures, but too weary and shaken by Leo’s visit to care. Considering the length of Angie’s employment with her, Claudia ought to be able to trust her by now not to invite an armed robber or child molester into the house. She was almost twenty-two, not a feckless teenage baby-sitter.

Yet Leo had made her feel very much like a teenager again, she conceded grudgingly—hot, bothered, awkward, oversensitive to atmosphere. It had been embarrassment, she told herself—the embarrassment of memories that no woman with any pride would want to recall. And that was all.

Determined to be satisfied with that explanation, she climbed into the bed across the room from Jake’s, having fought a very heavy battle against a feverish longing to snatch him out of bed and hug him tight to comfort herself. That would be selfish, and she was not a selfish mother…was she? No, of course she wasn’t.

She put up with an employer who would have taxed the temper of a saint just so that Jake could eat well, live in a comfortable house and play in a spacious garden with lots of toys. So he had virtually nothing to call his own, and his clothes were all the twins’ hand-me-downs, but he was still too little to appreciate those facts. This year she had wanted to give him a proper Christmas, though. That was why she had dared to risk Claudia’s wrath to ask for more money, but the recollection of the earlier part of the evening could no longer hold her concentration…

It was almost impossible for her to believe that Wallace Neville was willing to entertain the butler’s daughter at his vast ancestral home. Would he have invited her to stay in the main house, or would he have expected her to squash herself back into her father and stepmother’s disgracefully damp and desolate little basement flat? And if Leo’s grandfather had offered her financial help, would she have been weak enough to accept it?

Uneasy with the thought, Angie tossed and turned sleeplessly. It was out of the question anyway. Claudia would blow a gasket if Angie demanded time off over Christmas, and until Jake was old enough to start nursery school at least the Dicksons were their security.

Even so, she still lay awake, staring into the darkness, helplessly remembering the first time she had seen Leo when she was thirteen. Every Christmas and every summer he had come to stay with his grandfather, and although his English was perfect he had remained quintessentially Greek. Exotic, fascinating and extravagantly handsome, he had become the natural focus of Angie’s first crush. Of course, eight years her senior, he had barely noticed that she was alive in those days.

During the summer when she was fourteen, Leo had brought a girlfriend with him. She had had a very irritating giggle. With intense amusement, Angie had watched Leo wince. But the following year laughter had been thin on the ground. Petrina Phillipides had come to visit—a porcelain-perfect and dainty little Greek heiress with a cloud of silky black hair and an elderly maiden aunt in tow as a chaperon. Angie had ground her teeth in disbelief while she had watched Leo fall in love. Couldn’t he see that Petrina was too spoilt, too conceited, too empty-headed, with her silly clothes and even sillier hairstyles, to provide lasting appeal for an intelligent man?

No, Leo had been blind, and the summer after that Petrina had had even better reason to look smug. She had been wearing Leo’s engagement ring. Angie had been aghast, but even then she hadn’t given up all hope. After all, many an engagement was broken before the altar was reached, she had reasoned, snatching at straws.

However, when Wallace had finally flown out to Leo’s wedding and no last-minute miracle had prevented the dreadful deed from being done, Angie had been inconsolable. But by then she had been seventeen, and thoroughly fed up with herself for ever having wasted time languishing over a male who had always been out of reach and who was now another woman’s husband. So she had started dating herself and, boy, had she dated! Her five-foot-ten-inch model-slim body, symmetrical features and waist-length mane of pale blonde hair had ensured that she was never short of eager admirers.

Petrina had been sullenly pregnant that Christmas, and the unimpressed mother of a beautiful baby girl a few months later. Leo had adored his daughter. Angie’s heart had ached when she’d seen him lavish unashamed love and warmth on little Jenny, who had been named after his late mother. Petrina had been an indifferent and petulant parent, thrusting her baby back at the nanny as soon as she decently could, visibly resenting the fact that her daughter and not herself was now the centre of attention. And Angie had thought, Oh, Leo, Leo…why didn’t you wait for me to grow up?

But that very same year tragedy had intervened to destroy Leo’s family. Christmas hadn’t been celebrated at Deveraux Court. Wallace hadn’t had the heart for it, and Leo had remained in Greece. His wife and his baby daughter had been killed in a car crash. That next summer, however, Leo had come back, alone and brooding, and he had taken up residence in the Folly by the lake, shunning all company.

And Angie, in her complete and utter stupidity, had decided that she was finally to have her chance with Leo, and that it had to be then or never, before he flew back to Greece and fell madly in love with some other unsuitable woman…

‘Now that I know who Leo Demetrios is,’ Claudia droned on in her most gracious mood the following afternoon, ‘I realise that you could scarcely keep a man of his importance outside the house. But he has to be the single exception to the rule, Angie. Don’t open that door again when we’re out.’

Money fairly talked, Angie conceded grimly. Claudia had already been on the phone to all her friends, saying things in her carrying voice like, ‘You’ll never guess who we had in our house last night…the most utterly charming man… Must be worth billions… Yes, employs our au pair’s father… Can you believe, she didn’t even offer him a cup of coffee? Probably quite overpowered by him just turning up like that… I don’t think Greeks can be as class-conscious as we are…’

Oh, don’t you believe it, Angie reflected with gritted teeth as she slammed shut the door on the washing machine and switched it on to drown out Claudia’s verbal ecstasy. When Leo had sobered up to a dawn that woke him to the unlovely reality that he was actually sharing a bed with the butler’s daughter, he had vacated that bed so fast, Angie had been cut to the bone. But even then she had been poorly prepared for the blunt and wounding force of the rejection which had so swiftly concluded their brief intimacy and left her bereft of any hope…or pride.

The doorbell went. Angie padded through to the hall and then stopped dead in the porch. Through the side window, she could see the long, impressive bonnet of a chauffeur-driven limousine. Suddenly breathless with an undeniable sense of anticipation, she pulled open the door. Leo, a breathtakingly elegant vision in a dove-grey suit, white silk shirt and pale blue tie, gazed down at her. He looked drop-dead gorgeous.

And Angie’s treacherous heartbeat hit a dizzy peak, as if she were riding a big dipper. The most intense and shattering surge of physical awareness paralysed her to the spot.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to come back,’ Angie whispered.

Leo dealt her the most fleeting glance before flashing a brilliant smile at something or someone over her shoulder. ‘Mrs Dickson?’

‘Claudia, please…’ the brunette carolled.

Leo strode past Angie as if she were the invisible woman and grasped Claudia’s eagerly extended hand.

‘Leo…?’ Angie muttered in confusion.

‘I’m here to speak to your employer, Angie, if you would excuse us?’

‘Come into the drawing room.’ Claudia gave Leo a delighted smile. ‘Make some coffee, Angie.’

Fizzing with incredulous annoyance at the dismissal, Angie went to put on the kettle then returned to the hall.

‘So dreadfully sorry, but I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly spare her at present. We’ll have visitors staying over Christmas,’ Claudia was saying apologetically.

Angie pressed the door wider and stood on the threshold, furious that she had been deliberately excluded from a discussion that related to her. How dared Leo do this? How dared he go over her head as if she were a child who could not speak up for herself?

‘When did Angie last have a holiday?’ Leo drawled softly from his stance by the marble fireplace.

Caught unprepared by the question, Claudia frowned. ‘Well, er…’

‘In fact, Angie doesn’t receive holidays in this household, does she, Mrs Dickson?’ Raw contempt glittered in Leo’s steady gaze.

‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ Claudia asked rather shrilly.

‘Leo—’ Angie began weakly.

‘Angie’s working conditions are the talk of the neighbourhood,’ Leo countered with biting censure, his strong, hard-boned features grim. ‘Indeed, sweatshop labour would be a generous description of her terms of employment within your home.’

‘I…I beg your pardon?’ Her face mottling with ugly colour, Claudia was openly shocked by the sudden attack.

‘Leo, for heaven’s sake!’ Angie intervened in horror.

But Leo didn’t even glance in her direction. ‘You took advantage of a pregnant teenager. For more than two years you have worked her round the clock and paid her peanuts for the privilege. One has a duty of care towards one’s staff, but you have disregarded that fact. As you are neither poor nor unintelligent, there is no extenuating circumstance which might excuse such unscrupulous behaviour.’

‘How dare you speak to me like that? Get out of my house!’ Claudia was now brick-red with disbelieving fury.

‘Go and pack, Angie,’ Leo murmured without batting a magnificent eyelash; indeed, the curious beginnings of a smile were already tugging at the corners of his sensual mouth. ‘I will wait in the car.’

‘I’m not going anywhere…’ Angie began unevenly.

‘The talk of the neighbourhood, am I?’ Claudia sent the younger woman a look of outraged accusation. ‘When I think of what we’ve done for you—’

‘You’ve done nothing but use her for your own selfish purposes,’ Leo interposed with sardonic cool.

‘You’re sacked… I want you and that child of yours out of this house—right now!’ Claudia screeched at Angie, full blast.