by Lynne Graham
She would not surrender to that excitement, she told herself furiously but he lowered his dark head and, instead of the aggressive assault she had expected, he let his mouth nip teasingly along the fullness of her lower lip, locking the oxygen in her throat.
‘Angelo, please...’ Her own voice sounded miles away, oddly strangled.
‘Please what?’ He let his tongue delve inch by inch between her parted lips and the world stood still and her knees turned to sawdust. Her entire body was pitched to that single caress.
‘Stop,’ she moaned.
‘But you want this as much as I do.’ His tongue flicked into the sensitive interior of her mouth and she clutched at him, every muscle jerking tight. He was pushing her backwards, lifting her off the carpet and then pressing her back against the wall.
He buried his lips hotly in a hollow of her collarbone and she trembled violently, her nipples peaking into painful sensitivity. His hands skimmed down the taut length of her thighs and she felt him shudder against her, his heart thundering against her spread fingers, as madly accelerated as her own.
He cupped the ripe curve of her bottom in his hands and she bit at his shoulder in frustration, what remained of her control evaporating fast.
‘Tell me that you’re lying,’ he urged unsteadily.
‘What?’ she mumbled, slurring the word, lost in a world of intense sensation that utterly seduced.
‘Tell me that you’re not pregnant,’ Angelo demanded in a roughened, almost pleading undertone.
‘But...I am,’ she responded on the peak of a sob of unbearable excitement.
‘Bitch,’ he groaned savagely, and suddenly tore himself back from her.
Kelda opened glazed eyes. Angelo was several feet away, his breathing pattern ruptured and audible. He made no attempt to conceal his blatant physical excitement. He looked back at her while she braced herself with shaking hands against the wall to stay upright. Luminescent gold engulfed her in the implacable force of his will.
‘And the baby is not mine...it’s definitely not mine?’ Angelo persisted roughly, rawly launching the demand at her in raking challenge. ‘How can you be so sure it’s not?’
In her mind’s eye, she saw him with Fiona and the pain and bitterness hit her afresh. To admit the truth would be the ultimate humiliation. ‘Definitely not yours,’ she spelt out.
He raked something at her in his own language and then spread his hands in a soundless arc of violent anger. ‘I am not prepared to live with the reminder that you went to bed with another man after me! If you choose to behave like a whore, you take the responsibility for the consequences...I will not! I don’t want you with another man’s bastard!’
In increasing distress, Kelda put her hands over her ears, lowering her head as a wave of dizziness folded in on her.
Spots swam in front of her eyes. Angelo blurred out of view. She thought she was going to suffocate in the darkness before she passed out and slid down the wall in a faint.
She felt so sick coming to that she was afraid to move a muscle.
‘She’s coming round,’ an unfamiliar voice said witheringly. ‘As I said she would. Perhaps if you fed your wife a little more and let her go to bed at a more reasonable hour, she would be somewhat healthier. Pregnant women need extra rest and a sensible diet—’
‘Pregnant,’ Angelo echoed, not quite steadily, with the same revulsion that might have distinguished a reference to an unmentionable disease.
‘If that is your attitude, I can quite see why she’s starving herself into a skeleton...what has she had to eat today?’
‘The icing off a slice of wedding cake. Nothing else.’
Kelda’s eyes opened wide at this instantaneous and correct response. How had Angelo known that? He must have been watching her.
Angelo had called out a doctor. The gentleman in question was balding, beetle-browed and near retirement. He was also treating Angelo to a look of scathing contempt. ‘And that didn’t bother you?’ he demanded.
‘I’m fine...sorry you had to be bothered,’ Kelda broke in hurriedly and tried to sit up.
The doctor’s hand restrained her. ‘Stay where you are. I want to see you in my ante-natal clinic Thursday afternoon at two and don’t bother bringing your husband. We’ll do very well without him.’ With that blistering assurance, he took his leave. ‘Don’t trouble yourself, Mr Rossetti. I can see myself out.’
Long after the cottage door had slammed, the silence stretched. Angelo was poised rigid-backed by the window. He was staring out into the darkness beyond the glass. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,’ he admitted with gritted abruptness.
Kelda glanced down at herself and discovered she was attired in one of her mother’s frilly cotton nightdresses. Her cheeks flushed. She hadn’t been wearing anything under the robe. ‘You put this on me—’
‘The least of my sins,’ Angelo said half under his breath.
‘I didn’t need a doctor—’
‘What was I supposed to do when you collapsed? Step over you and drive off?’
‘Yes,’ she said sickly, recalling all that had passed before. ‘It would have been more in keeping.’
‘I was very shocked and confused when I came here tonight. I did not fully consider what I was doing,’ Angelo proffered in a murderously controlled tone. ‘I should have waited until I had cooled down. Naturally you are pregnant. Why should you lie about such a thing?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Kelda was drained, depressed, empty of all reaction.
‘What was between us is finished—’
She closed her eyes in sudden pain, registered that she was not after all as empty of emotion as she had imagined. She could not cope with Angelo and she could not cope without him. She didn’t know which was worst.
‘It has to be,’ Angelo stressed. ‘I could never forget that you went to bed with Seadon after you were with me in Italy—’
Dumbly she shook her head on the pillow.
‘I could never accept another man’s child in these circumstances. How could you let him touch you after me?’ he bit out in sudden slashing challenge.
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She turned her head away.
‘Are you finally ashamed of yourself when it is too late to make any difference?’ he derided half under his breath.
‘You could never trust me...all these years, never once have you trusted me or given me the benefit of the doubt,’ she condemned helplessly, talking to herself, no longer listening to him. ‘I can’t handle that, I never could.’
‘You won’t be expected to handle it from now on.’
‘And now for the good news,’ she whispered unsteadily.
Dark, dark eyes without a shade of gold rested on her. ‘I wanted you so badly, for so long that it was like a sickness in my blood. I was determined to have you at any cost. I thought I could exorcise you with sex but all that achieved was an even greater obsession. I don’t like what you do to me,’ Angelo confessed, his beautiful mouth thinning into a forbidding line. ‘I don’t like the way I behave with you. I like to be in control...a hangover from my childhood...I am not in control with you.’
Neither was she, and sometimes, like now, when he was tearing her in two, it was terrifying. She hated him for hurting her, for not loving her, for insulting her, but when it came to the image of him walking out of the door she wanted to trail him back to hurt and insult all over again. The destruction was more bearable than the emptiness.
‘Go away!’ she suddenly demanded.
Angelo expelled his breath in an audible hiss of rampant frustration. ‘You look so fragile and yet you’re strong enough to defy me. Even as a child you defied me!’
She had thrust her face into the pillow. ‘I needed someone to put their arms round me and make me feel I belonged!’
‘I couldn’t trust myself that close,’ Angelo muttered in a stifled tone of self-disgust.
‘I wish you’d go.’
‘No, you don’t...so
metimes I know what you feel before you even think it. Who is the father?’ he asked again without warning, but this time his wine-dark voice was icily controlled. ‘Is it Seadon?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I would really prefer not to know for sure,’ he admitted harshly.
‘Damn you, Angelo!’
‘You need to eat something,’ he murmured prosaically. ‘What do you want?’
‘You’re insane,’ she accused weakly.
‘Guilty as hell. You’re sick, you’re pregnant and your wrists have a full set of my fingerprints on them,’ Angelo enumerated curtly. ‘How do you expect me to feel?’
He left the room. Shakily, she lifted her wrists into the light and saw the purplish bruising he had inflicted earlier. She hadn’t felt any pain at the time. Her fair skin marked easily but feeling a total heel had to be a new sensation for Angelo, and not one that would do him any noticeable harm. He would leave her now and go back to Fiona. Lying had been the right thing to do, she told herself wretchedly. The torturous cycle of destruction inside her would be stopped and she would heal. Angelo would leave her alone.
It took him a long time but eventually he reappeared with a bowl of soup.
They were in a state of temporarily suspended hostilities, she acknowledged. Dawn was breaking outside. She remembered another dawn and her cheeks burned, making her duck her head down and tuck into the soup. The soup was as burnt as her skin. She persevered beneath his taut scrutiny, ridiculously conscious all of a sudden of a desire not to reject even so small an olive branch. In the harsher light, the strain in his darkly handsome visage was pronounced. He looked as savaged as she felt.
The words he had employed came back to haunt her. Sickness...obsession...exorcism. And sex. Unhealthy, destructive, debilitating. Not flattering. And what was that hangover from his childhood? He liked to be in control. Scarcely a revelation to anyone in Angelo’s radius! Angelo could turn an impromptu picnic into an organised field expedition.
‘Why do you have to be in control?’
His eyes veiled. ‘I grew up with a woman like you. A free spirit. Any man, any time, any place—’
Like you... She swallowed hard on her angry frustration. ‘What woman?’
‘My mother. And she wasn’t ashamed of it either. My father adored her but he couldn’t live with her affairs. That’s why he divorced her, but she still got custody of me. I hated the life I had with her. She was suffocatingly possessive and very volatile—’
‘So are you.’
Angelo dealt her a chilling half-smile. ‘Only with you, and that I can overcome,’ he stated with cool conviction. ‘I don’t want to live on the wild side with any woman. I want a quiet, well-behaved, conservative wife who would die of shock if I made love to her the way I make love to you. At times, she’ll bore me...after a few years, I’ll be walking out the door and forgetting she exists, and not long after that I will most probably set up a mistress.’
‘And I hope like hell your wife throws orgies while you’re at the office!’ Kelda breathed in a blitz of stormy revulsion and pain.
‘You might; she won’t. She’ll accept the package deal. Many women do. Status, money, children and a husband whose infidelities are discreet.’
‘You burnt the soup.’ Kelda rolled over, presenting him with her narrow back. Her fingers clawed like talons into the pillow beside her head. She could not deal with such honesty. He was not trying to hurt her. He was telling her what he believed would make him happy...or as happy as he believed he could afford to be and still be one hundred percent in control.
‘You should keep that appointment with the doctor. If you need anything—’ He hesitated. ‘Try not to involve me unless it’s an emergency.’
She listened to the car drive off, strained to hear the last distant sounds and then flopped. He burnt the soup and I ate it. And she started to laugh like a madwoman until the dragging sobs surfaced and finally she cried, cried for herself alone. Angelo, the Angel of Darkness, who made the City quail, was an emotional coward. A wimp like that wasn’t worth her tears, and he wasn’t fit to be the father of her child either!
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I‘VE been laughing into my cornflakes every morning this week following Carol Philips’ story of life with dear, misunderstood Danny,’ Gina said mockingly to the table at large. She looped a straying strand of cornsilk hair from her brow with a beringed hand and giggled. ‘He actually brought one of his women home to lunch and let her think that his wife was his sister!’
‘Carol Philips was a doormat. She got what she asked for,’ one of the other women remarked drily. ‘I’d have thrown him and his floozy out...I wouldn’t let any man treat me like that!’
‘She had two young children and he kept her very short of money,’ Kelda put in quietly. ‘She was only eighteen when he married her. She had never had a job. I can understand how trapped she must have felt—’
‘Oh, you!’ Her friend Gina wrinkled her classic nose. ‘How can you feel sorry for Danny’s wife after what he did to you?’
‘I must have hurt her as well,’ Kelda pointed out ruefully.
‘Even she admitted that you were the only one who dumped him immediately you found out that he was married—’
‘And it’s cleared your name of all that rubbish that was printed,’ Russ commented. ‘You came out squeaky clean, compared with all the others the wronged wife chose to name. There’s been quite a few red faces on the catwalks this past week!’
Her companions continued to trawl over Carol’s revelations, a tabloid exposé which had been running all week and causing more hilarity than anything else. Danny’s wife had sold her story because Danny had left her practically destitute when he’d swanned off to New York, taking the children’s curvaceous teenage nanny with him.
Kelda pushed back her chair and got up.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Gina asked anxiously, searching her pale face.
‘I’m off to the cloakroom again...don’t draw everybody’s attention to it,’ Kelda begged with a wry grin.
She was feeling sick, although she was trying to hide the fact. In addition she had a nagging pain in her lower abdomen. It was not the first time that she had experienced such symptoms in recent days. The pain came and went, sometimes only irritating, but on at least one other occasion actually quite painful.
She had meant to make time to go to the doctor but she was quite convinced that she knew what was wrong with her. The thick pregnancy manual she had bought described what was called ‘round ligament pain’, something to do with the stretching of the ligaments that supported the uterus and nothing to worry about. She would make an appointment at the clinic for the day after tomorrow, she promised herself. Just to be on the safe side.
In the cloakroom she looked at her reflection and made a face. Her cunningly cut, flowing dress concealed the firm swell of her stomach from all but the most intent observers, but she still felt like a beached whale. Seven months pregnant and feeling it, she thought ruefully.
She had kept so busy over the past five months that the time had flown but sometimes, like now, in the middle of a convivial crowd of friends, something that was more than tiredness would swamp her. It was a combination of loneliness, self-pity and emptiness, and she thoroughly despised herself for the weakness. After all, she had been been very lucky and she was not alone, except in the sense that she did not have a supportive male in her life.
Every other day, Tomaso and Daisy were either on the phone or the doorstep, having failed to fulfil Angelo’s prophecy that they would spend most of their time abroad. Tim appeared regularly, invariably clutching yet another fluffy toy to add to a steadily growing collection. And, best of all, Russ and Gina had returned to London to set up a modelling agency of their own and tomorrow they were getting married. That was one reason why Kelda had no intention of being a wet blanket.
Her friends had been marvellous. When the first unmistakable signs of her burgeoning stom
ach had forced her to stop modelling, Russ and Gina had stepped in to offer her a job. Gina was in so much demand as a model that it was impossible for her to devote much time to helping Russ with their agency. Russ, in turn, was either out on a shoot or in the studio. Kelda had been installed to handle the bookings and run the small agency on a day-to-day basis.
She was not rich but she was no longer in debt. She had managed to work long enough to clear all outstanding bills. Then she had cut up her credit cards and returned them, accepting that she had to learn to exist on a much reduced budget until such time as the baby was born. Her hand slid down to her stomach in an unconsciously protective movement. The years ahead would be a struggle and she had faced that reality head-on, but her commitment to her unborn child remained unchanged.
Gina was talking almost fiercely to Russ when Kelda rejoined them. One of those sudden awkward silences fell. ‘Do you want me to go away and come back again?’ Kelda said only half-jokingly.
‘You look tired,’ Russ told her abruptly. ‘Do you want to go home?’
‘Dear Russ...such fabulous tact,’ Gina breathed, throwing her fiancé a dirty look. ‘Why should Kelda scuttle off home because he’s here?’
More even-tempered than Gina, Russ sighed. ‘I only thought—’
Gina grabbed Kelda’s arm. ‘Look, there he is over there!’
Kelda didn’t want to look. Suddenly she turned cold. Angelo was here. There was only one male capable of rousing Gina to such fury. It had to be Angelo. Sometimes, Kelda wished she hadn’t told her friends the truth, but she had known they would be discreet, and a lie which promised to stretch ahead of her year after year had not seemed practical.
‘Lousy, womanising swine!’ Gina hissed in her ear. ‘That’s Isabel Dunning with him. She’s really top-drawer.’
Isabel, Kelda rhymed inwardly, to follow on from Adele, Caroline, Felicity and Fiona. In five months, Angelo had worked through the English upper classes with a fine-tooth comb, but not one of the lovely ladies had lasted. The gossip columnists were agog at such volatile romancing. Then they didn’t know what Kelda knew...Angelo was scouring society for a suitable wife. A conservative wife from a good background with no scandals in her past.