Her Christmas Fantasy & The Winter Bride (24 page)

‘Hi, Leo!' she had called, all brave and bright and unconcerned, walking past as if he were just anyone, instead of the man who had torn her heart in two and left her more dead than alive.

And when she had come home in the early hours of the following morning, still dying that murderously slow death of deprivation inside herself, the party-girl façade abandoned for lack of an audience, Leo had strolled out through the French windows in the south wing and blocked her path.

‘You're messing up your life, Angie.'

He had sounded horribly like her father, and she had treated him to an appropriately bored smile of indifference. ‘If I am, I'm having a lot of fun, Leo.'

‘What an incredible thrill it must be to play nightly chauffeur to a drunk.'

‘Drew's not a drunk…he just likes to have a good time, that's all,' she had protested, defending the young man she had come to rely on as her only real friend. ‘He takes me to parties and clubs, and I'm meeting a lot of people. In fact I'm having the most wonderful time I've ever had in my life! So what's that to you? What do you want from me?'

Given that foolish invitation to be frank, Leo's dark eyes had glittered like black ice in the moonlight. ‘Nothing. Absolutely and finally nothing,' he had drawled with brutal conviction. ‘What could I possibly want that I haven't already had? Sorry, but I don't go for the new look, Angie. That is a very trashy dress.'

And she had stood there for a very long time after he had gone, mascara-smeared round eyes emptied of tears, lipstick smudged, provocative dress lurching off one bowed shoulder, brave and bright no longer, doused like an already spent and
flickering candle flame by his contemptuous distaste. She had known then that she would not tell Leo she was carrying his baby. She had known then that no matter how scared she was, no matter how desperate, she would never again allow Leo the opportunity to look down at her as if she were something that had just crawled up out of the gutter at his feet.

‘You'll get over him,' Drew had said bracingly on one of the rare occasions when he was sober enough to make rational conversation. ‘You had a crush and he just broke out of months of enforced celibacy. Don't build it into something it wasn't. I did try to warn you, didn't I? Leo's been chased the length and the breadth of two countries since he was a teenager. He's had besotted secretaries spread themselves across his desk, pornographic invitations from complete strangers and gorgeous lookers risking life and limb to attract his attention everywhere he goes… Angie, you're lovely, but, sadly, there's a whole host of even lovelier women out there. You never had a hope of holding Leo.'

Drew had been so honest with her then. He had just told it as it was. Fact of life. Like to like. Leo would inevitably love and marry another rich, spoilt woman who would spend half the day complaining about a broken nail, the suspicion of a draught or the damp English climate which made her hair flop. In short, Leo would wed another Petrina, a self-obsessed, whinging moan…

‘Shall I take your case down now, Miss Brown?'

Angie whipped round, scarlet with discomfiture, as if that last thought might be written in block capitals across her face. Leo's chauffeur was hovering expectantly outside the bedroom door. As she nodded and turned away to lift her son, she thought about Drew again and finally conceded that she had been foolish to trust him as a friend and confidant.

Drew had grown up the apple of his grandfather's eye,
only to then find himself subjected to constant unflattering comparisons with Leo. As a result, Drew had learned to loathe Leo. And Drew must have sensed Leo's vein of lingering sexual possessiveness where the butler's daughter was concerned. The younger man could only have claimed an intimate relationship with Angie out of some hateful male competitive need to get a rise out of his cousin.

But she was still appalled that Drew, whom she had trusted with the secret of her pregnancy, could have sunk so low the minute she was out of sight and hearing. As for him giving her money towards an abortion…complete rubbish! Angie had never at any stage considered that possibility because Jake's conception had not been an accident. She could not have lived with that truth and gone on to contemplate a termination.

And perhaps she shouldn't have been so shocked by Leo's revelations, she acknowledged ruefully. She should have remembered that although there had never been anything but platonic friendship between her and Drew, although she had never been less than honest about her feelings for Leo, Drew had still stormed off in a furious sulk when she'd made the mistake of telling him that she was carrying Leo's baby.

 

Leo frowned at Angie's appearance as she descended the stairs, Jake anchored on her hip. ‘
Cristos
…it's the middle of winter out there!' he exclaimed. ‘You'll freeze in that outfit. I assumed that you were changing into something more appropriate.'

Angie reddened with considerable embarrassment. ‘It's either this or my jeans, and I happen to think I look smarter dressed like this.'

‘We'll stop and buy you a coat on the way,' Leo said drily, as if he were talking to a very small and silly child.

‘No. We will not stop anywhere and buy me
anything
,'
Angie stressed, bright blue eyes spitting angry, defiant pride. ‘I hope I know enough to be very, very wary of Greeks bearing gifts!'

Stunned by that acid retaliation, Leo froze. His aggressive jawline squared, anger flaring in his gleaming dark eyes. ‘You insult me—'

‘Isn't it strange how sensitive you can be when you're so very
in
sensitive about my feelings?' Angie slotted in between furiously clenched teeth.

Nostrils flaring, all volatile Greek in that instant, Leo flung wide the front door. Untouched by the wariness most individuals employed around Leo when he was in the wrong mood, Angie stalked down the steps, head held high, and climbed into the limousine. There she settled Jake into the brand-new child's car seat anchored opposite. It had obviously been purchased purely for her son's use…

However, new clothes for herself were one thing, her child's comfort and safety quite another. As Leo folded himself in beside her like a prowling sabre-toothed tiger, Angie said precisely nothing about the car seat. Indeed she turned her head rigidly away from him and stared blindly into space.

 

Angie woke up groggily, her cheek pillowed on a hard male thigh, her fingers loosely resting on another. Registering that she was virtually in Leo's lap, and that the warm, heavy weight round her shoulders was his arm, she turned scarlet, and in her haste to detach herself from him she very nearly catapulted herself onto the floor of the limousine.

Steadying herself perilously on the very edge of the seat, she pushed her tumbled hair back off her brow and thrust herself back into her former position in the opposite corner to do up the belt which Leo must have undone. Jake was asleep, baby-sized, breathy little snores emerging from him.

‘He was marvellous company until about twenty minutes ago,' Leo remarked, grimly amused dark eyes absorbing her tousled discomfiture. ‘You wouldn't believe how many cows, sheep and horses there are to exclaim over in the space of a hundred and fifty miles—'

‘For heaven's sake, what time is it?' Angie looked at her watch in horror, registering that she had been asleep for almost two hours. It was late afternoon. Electric tension filled her as she appreciated that they would very shortly be reaching their destination.

‘We saw a train too; that was a major highlight of our journey,' Leo continued silkily. ‘But the memory I will cherish most was Jake's request for an urgent pit stop at the precise moment we
passed
the motorway services. The next fifteen miles went by in a blur of edge-of-the-seat excitement—'

‘You had to take him to the toilet…why on earth didn't you wake me up?' Angie gasped in stricken embarrassment.

‘You were dead to the world, and I was feeling generous.'

The back of Angie's nose tickled unbearably and she started sneezing. She fumbled for a tissue even though she knew she didn't have one. A pristine folded linen handkerchief was tossed on her lap.

‘Thanks,' she mumbled round the fifth sneeze, and then she held her breath, hoping that it worked for sneezes the way it worked for hiccups. It didn't. Choking and spluttering, she began coughing instead. ‘S-sorry…I seem to have caught a cold.'

‘You can go straight to bed as soon as we arrive.'

‘Do you think I could stay there until the New Year?' Angie asked facetiously because her heart was sinking like a stone with every mile that brought them closer to Deveraux Court.

‘Take me with you and you'll be lucky to see daylight before the spring.'

Angie swallowed the next cough and shot him a startled glance.

Leo gazed back at her, his sensual mouth curving into a sudden slashing smile of vibrant amusement. Her drowsy eyes widened and, powerless to drag her attention from him again, she stared. Whoosh… That smile, full of such utterly mesmeric charm, dug talons into her heart. She had seen so much of that smile that long ago weekend…

It isn't just sex on his side, she had told herself then, buoyant with relief and optimism. He likes me, he understands my jokes, he looks so happy just to be with me. Angie stiffened at the recollection, the dreamy look in her eyes hardening into bitter self-reproach. She had really
believed
that Leo was feeling the same intense emotional sense of recognition that she was feeling. In between frantic bouts of sex, of course, she affixed painfully. She whipped her head round so abruptly to look out of the window that she hurt her neck.

And as she recognised the road her heart started beating suffocatingly fast behind her ribcage. Minutes later, the limousine drove beneath the turreted gates of Deveraux Court and up the thickly wooded, winding drive. Angie sat forward, taut as a piece of elastic drawn too tight and ready to break, imagery as sharp as needles stabbing at her and tearing at the breath in her throat.

‘Relax, Angie,' Leo advised lazily. ‘You're coming home.'

Home? Yes; painful and ironic as it was to remember, she had once loved this place more than any other on earth. She watched the vista of the parkland opening up, the rolling acres of the estate adorned by mature and stately trees, beautiful even without the softening veil of spring leaves. Then the
drive rounded the last bend and the house itself unfolded, an architectural triumph of elaborate but wonderfully time-mellowed Elizabethan brick.

The limo crunched across the gravel frontage and rolled to a halt. Angie only had eyes now for the imposing front door.

Sleepily stretching, Jake woke up and crowed in delight as Leo unclasped the belt on the car seat and lifted him into his arms.

Angie didn't even notice. For once she was blind and deaf to her child as she slid out of the car and began walking slowly towards the door. She saw her father waiting, a slight, dapper man in his early sixties, clad in an old-fashioned dark suit. He looked so stiff, so unyielding, she thought in sudden familiar pain, as if someone had sown in a poker where his backbone should have been.

‘Dad…?' she began unevenly.

‘Good afternoon, madam…sir,' Samuel Brown murmured without any expression at all and the slight bow of the head that he always practised around those people he saw as his social superiors. ‘I hope you had a good journey down from town. A pleasant, fresh afternoon, isn't it?'

Angie was frozen to the spot. At that greeting, even Leo stilled for a split second. Then he freed a hand from the child clinging to his shoulder and rested it against Angie's tense back. ‘Brown—?'

‘Mr Neville is awaiting your arrival, sir,' her father continued with wooden precision. ‘Do you wish me to show your guests upstairs first?'

‘When the time comes, I shall conduct my guests upstairs, Brown,' Leo drawled with ice-cold clarity, long, lean fingers eloquent of his incredulity flexing against Angie's quivering
spine. ‘We will see my grandfather immediately but there is no need for you to announce us.'

‘As you wish, sir,' the butler said punctiliously, and then he turned away to allow them through the door.

A
S
S
AMUEL
B
ROWN TROD,
rigid-backed, back across the echoing Great Hall and vanished beyond the green baize door below the magnificent Jacobean staircase, Angie gazed after her father, utterly savaged by his behaviour.

Leo lowered Jake to the floor. ‘Wallace will be in the drawing room.'

‘Don't you dare try to pretend that what just happened
didn't
happen!' Tears of distress lashed Angie's eyes. ‘Did either you or Wallace even consider how my father might react to this situation?'

‘I feel desperately sorry for a man who feels he has to go to such ridiculous lengths to demonstrate his disapproval,' Leo drawled with sardonic bite. ‘But that little scene was pure, outrageous farce!'

‘Dad doesn't think I belong here in this part of the house… In fact he obviously doesn't want me anywhere under this roof, and whose fault is that?'

‘Drew's,' Leo slotted in grimly. ‘And to a very large extent your own. Your relationship with your father was strained even before you left.'

‘It's always been strained,' Angie muttered with driven honesty. ‘Just you try inheriting a father who is a total stranger at the age of thirteen and see how you get on!'

‘Brown will come round…he has no other choice,' Leo asserted with chilling conviction, his strong jawline hardening.

‘Don't you dare say anything to him…don't you dare humiliate him like that!' Angie warned him fiercely, her anxiety on her parent's behalf palpable. ‘I don't care if he treats me like the invisible woman; I can live with that. But don't you
dare
interfere, Leo. He has a private life and a family, and neither are any of your business!'

In fascination, Leo scanned her passionately defensive face. ‘
Theos
…you are deeply attached to your father.'

Having wearied of yanking at Leo's trouser leg for attention, the forgotten toddler hovering at their feet threw his little arms extravagantly wide and howled mournfully, ‘Cuddle, Leo!'

Dredged from her self-preoccupation, Angie stared down at her child with a dropped jaw.

‘Want cuddle,' Jake said less stridently, sidling up against Leo's knees and looking up at him pleadingly. ‘Want carried.'

Angie tugged her son towards her, but he resisted every step of the way. ‘Want Leo,' he told her stubbornly, stunning his mother with that bluntly stated preference.

‘He's just not used to men,' she said in a rush. ‘George Dickson was barely home long enough to notice his own kids, never mind one extra. I'm sorry.'

‘Why should you apologise? Jake and I got to know each other while you were asleep.'

‘I just didn't want him bothering you,' Angie muttered half under her breath.

‘I like children…and I'm not proud of my initial response to your son. Do try not to keep on ramming it down my throat,' Leo urged with immense irritation.

But all over again Angie was seeing her son throw his arms wide in emphasis, spreading his little hands demonstratively in a direct and strikingly apt imitation of Leo's expressive body language. The sight had sent Angie's nervous tension
rocketing sky-high. Guilt and a powerful current of dismay had seized her. Wallace Neville was a very shrewd old man. Suppose he saw that resemblance and exposed the charade she had allowed to continue? But wasn't it even more probable that he might simply take one astonished look at Jake's dark colouring and angrily proclaim his disbelief that his blond, blue-eyed grandson could possibly have fathered a child who looked so little like him?

Leo thrust open the door of the drawing room. Taut with apprehension, Angie preceded him, clutching her son's hand. Leo's grandfather stood in front of the fire, one frail hand braced on a walking stick, but his upright carriage, the proud set of his white head and the eagle-eyed sharpness of his gaze defied his eighty-odd years.

Angie hovered. Leo prodded her forward and closed the door. As Wallace Neville studied the little boy dragging his hand free of his mother's to run across to the huge wolfhound rising drowsily from the hearth, the most electrifying silence held. Then, as Angie began to move forward in dismay at Jake's headlong charge at the animal the old man raised an abrupt hand to stay her.

‘Boris loves children, and the boy is fearless. You should be proud of him.'

As the wolfhound dropped obligingly back down on the rug so that it could rub its great head against Jake's chest, Angie stilled. ‘I am,' she said rather defensively.

Wallace surveyed child and dog for several tense moments, and then he murmured with apparent satisfaction, ‘He's a fetching little fellow with a strong look of the family about him. What do you think, Leo?'

Angie gulped and stopped breathing.

‘He's an attractive child,' Leo conceded without voicing an opinion.

‘I know a Neville nose when I see one,' his grandfather
asserted as he pulled the bell rope by the massive fireplace. ‘Precious little escapes these eyes of mine.'

Angie stiffened. But Wallace Neville turned back to her with a bland smile. ‘You've done well to raise him this long alone, Angie. It couldn't have been easy.'

Angie swallowed uneasily, wondering if it was madness to imagine that that smile had a curious shark-like quality when she was being greeted with infinitely greater courtesy than she had ever expected to receive. ‘It wasn't.'

‘Well, that's over with now. Your life is about to change,' Wallace informed her.

‘I'm not sure I want my—'

‘I'm really looking forward to having a young child in the house over Christmas,' Wallace continued heartily as if he hadn't heard her. ‘The festive season just isn't the same once the family all grow up.'

Angie was briefly sidetracked by that unexpected burst of sentiment. Christmas at Deveraux Court…how drab the season had seemed spent anywhere else, she conceded ruefully. Mistletoe and holly strung up round the Great Hall, the giant tree felled on the estate itself, the party for the staff…

‘You'll wish to freshen up before dinner,' Wallace told her, springing her back out of her memories and making her tense up again. ‘I hope you'll be very comfortable here, Angie. You ought to be…we've brought in a nanny to help out.'

‘A nanny?' Angie exclaimed incredulously.

‘Harriet Davis used to work for one of our neighbours and comes with excellent references.' Wallace nodded approvingly to himself. ‘She's fairly panting with eagerness to get her hands on this little chap.'

As Angie parted her lips to voice her objections to such an arrangement being made without recourse to her, the door opened and the rotund and decidedly determined-looking shape of Nanny Davis swam into view. She gave Angie a wide,
excited smile, but her attention swung almost immediately to the child kneeling beside the wolfhound.

‘Oh, what a little pet,' she carolled with warm appreciation. ‘What a portrait that would make, sir!'

‘Nanny's going to keep an eye on us both while Jake and I become acquainted,' Wallace announced, exercising the same prerogative as royalty in concluding the interview the instant it had served his purpose.

Leo curved a lean hand round Angie's elbow and pressed her out of the room. ‘Jake won't come to any harm,' he said as he absorbed her angry disconcertion. ‘And you can't be tied night and day to a toddler's demands while you're here. I'll show you to your room.'

‘Now that you have divested me of my child…mission accomplished, is that it?' Angie accused as she followed him up the stairs.

‘If my mission had been accomplished…' Leo paused on the minstrel's gallery to wait for her, densely lashed dark eyes scanning her beautiful face and flaring to hot gold. ‘…I wouldn't still be seething with lust.'

Angie's heartbeat hit the Richter scale as her eyes clashed with that smouldering, explicit look. A frisson of treacherous heat slivered through her tensing limbs, and she trembled. ‘Leo—'

‘On the other hand, satisfaction didn't lead to satiation the last time,' Leo conceded in a throaty purr of intimate recollection. ‘I couldn't get enough of you. And you couldn't get enough of me. No man could possibly forget a reception like that.'

Angie went scarlet with shame at the reminder, but her breasts still stirred and swelled inside her cotton bra, her nipples peaking into taut, achingly sensitive buds.

‘And if I want to experience that all over again who could blame me?' Leo murmured softly. ‘You would be a liar if
you pretended to be any less eager. And why
should
you lie? There's no disgrace in acknowledging sexual hunger…or in satisfying it.'

Angie snatched in a tremulous breath and looked away, a hot pink flush delineating her cheekbones. Leo made it sound so easy, so simple. Sex as a mere bodily appetite, a hunger to assuage. He foresaw no complications. But then why should he? The very ease with which she had once surrendered her body had strongly influenced Leo's opinion of her. But Leo was a dangerously unpredictable mix of two very different cultures. He could sound so liberal, but he was fundamentally Greek and he hadn't loved or married a woman with permissive values. Drew had been very snide about the lack of intimacy between Leo and Petrina before their wedding…

‘It tells you so much about the
real
Leo,' Drew had sneered. ‘He's no more British in his attitudes than an alien! He had a load of hot affairs, but when it came to settling down he went back home and chose a prissy little Greek girl with a padlock on her virtue!'

The recollection made Angie flush uncomfortably. Belatedly registering that she had been dawdling and that Leo was subjecting her to a questioning appraisal while he waited for her to catch up, she parted her lips and asked jerkily, ‘Where am I sleeping…the attics?'

In answer, Leo strolled forward and cast the door wide on the magnificent Chinese bedroom suite. Drawing level with him, Angie stilled on the threshold, stealing a shocked and intimidated glance over the exquisite hand-blocked wallpaper and the delicate antique satinwood suite of furniture, which complemented the ornate four-poster bed with its superbly embroidered drapes and gilded and domed canopy lined with pleated scarlet silk. Then, straightening her back, she stepped over the invisible line of unease which had briefly gripped her.

‘Go to bed for a while before dinner,' Leo urged almost gently.

The instant she was alone, Angie inched forward almost guiltily onto the rich expanse of the oriental rug. Through the connecting door lay a grand Edwardian bathroom and dressing room. This was the south wing, which housed the principal guest rooms. Built in the late eighteenth century, a tribute to classical elegance, the south wing provided a radical contrast to the dark, oak-panelled rooms of the original Tudor house.

Her father and stepmother lived in the basement of the north wing, which was only about a hundred and fifty years old, but ironically that final Victorian addition to the Court had proved to be the least resistant to the cruel ravages of time…

‘A dark, dank little hole of a place,' Angie's mother, Grace, had called it with a shudder of contemptuous distaste. ‘I couldn't believe that your father expected me to live in a dump like that!'

The break between her parents had been bitter and final. Her mother had gone for a divorce and she had never looked back. A qualified caterer, she had started up her own restaurant and Angie had been attending an exclusive boarding-school by the age of seven. Only then had Grace told her daughter that the father she had never met was a butler, but that it had to be a big secret because her schoolfriends would laugh at her if they ever found out.

In short, Angie had been brought up to be ashamed of both her father and his means of making a living. But when Angie was thirteen her mother had died very suddenly of a heart attack and, simultaneously, Samuel Brown had become an unavoidable element of his teenage daughter's life.

The restaurant and the apartment above it had been mortgaged to the hilt. Grace had lived well and died at forty-two,
and she hadn't prepared for that possibility. Angie had had to leave her expensive fee-paying school. In the space of one shattering month, she had been forced to relinquish everything familiar and secure, and she had moved to Devon to attend a local school and live at Deveraux Court.

Like a too brightly coloured and strident parrot, she had swooped into her father and stepmother's bland lives, her habits, her expectations, her very outlook and image of herself utterly foreign and threatening to theirs. Their damp little flat had appalled her and, like her mother before her, she had had little respect for her father's unswerving loyalty to an old man who paid him so little that even his best suit was patched.

The discovery that her father had recently remarried
had
initially been a shock, but timid, rather colourless little Emily had been no wicked stepmother. The middle-aged daughter of a retired estate worker, and as indoctrinated with the tradition of serving the Nevilles as her butler husband, Emily had seemed the perfect wife, tailor-made for a man of Samuel's old-fashioned ilk…

Chewing uncomfortably at her lower lip, Angie hunched her shoulders beneath her jacket, thinking uneasily about her stepmother, a woman she had never really got to know until it was too late. She stared out of the window towards the distant boundaries of the ancient woodland which she had once loved with a passion only equalled by the love she had learnt to feel for the house itself. The Court was like an ever expanding time capsule, crammed full of wonderful, personal reminders of all the people who had ever lived within its walls right down through the ages.

But about four years ago some of those wonderful and irreplaceable items had begun to go missing, Angie recalled painfully. First a small brass carriage clock and, shortly afterwards, a little silver manicure set, both taken from rarely used bedrooms. Then the thefts had entered a new phase,
the articles clearly picked for their infinitely greater value. A Dresden shepherdess, a pair of exquisite matching salt-cellars, a Georgian tea caddy in the shape of a pear…