by Lynne Graham
Simultaneously a noisy crowd came out of the pub across the street and just as suddenly the scrum broke and scattered. Maxie knelt down on the wet pavement beside Angelos’s prone body and pushed his curling wet black hair off his brow, noting the pallor of his dark skin. ‘You stupid fool…you stupid, stupid fool,’ she moaned shakily.
Angelos lifted his head and shook it in a rather jerky movement. Slowly he began to pick himself up. Blood was running down his temples. ‘There were five of them,’ he grated, with clenched and bruised fists.
‘Get in your car and shut up in case they come back,’ Maxie muttered, tugging suggestively at his arm. ‘Other people don’t want to get involved these days. You could’ve been hammered to a pulp—’
‘Them and who else?’ Angelos flared explosively, all male ego and fireworks.
‘The police station is just down the street—’
‘I’m not going to the police over the head of those little punks!’ Angelos snarled, staggering slightly and spreading his long powerful legs to steady himself. ‘I got in a punch or two of my own—’
‘Not as many as they did.’ Maxie hauled at his sleeve and by dint of sustained pressure nudged him round to the passenger side of his opulent sports car.
‘What are you doing?’
‘You’re not fit to drive—’
‘Since when?’ he interrupted in disbelief.
Maxie yanked open the door. ‘Please, Angelos…you’re bleeding, you’re probably concussed. Just for once in your wretched life, do as someone else asks.’
He stood there and thought about that stunning concept for a whole twenty seconds. There was a definite struggle taking place and then, with a muffled curse, he gradually and stiffly lowered himself down into the passenger seat.
‘Can you drive a Ferrari?’ he enquired.
‘Of course,’ Maxie responded between clenched teeth of determination, no better than him at backing down.
The Ferrari lurched and jerked up the road.
‘Lights,’ Angelos muttered weakly. ‘I think you should have the lights on…or maybe I should just close my eyes—’
‘Shut up…I’m trying to concentrate!’
Having mastered the lights and located the right gear, Maxie continued, ‘It was typical of you to go leaping in, fists flying. Where are your security guards, for goodness’ sake?’
‘How dare you?’ Angelos splintered, leaning forward with an outrage somewhat tempered by the groan he emitted as the seat belt forced him to rest back again. ‘I can look after myself—’
‘Against five of them?’ Maxie’s strained mouth compressed, her stomach still curdling at what she had witnessed. Damn him, damn him. She felt so horribly guilty and shaken. ‘I’m taking you to Casualty—’
‘I don’t need a doctor…I’m OK,’ Angelos bit out in exasperation.
‘If you drop dead from a skull fracture or something,’ she said grimly, ‘I don’t want to feel responsible!’
‘I have cuts and bruises, nothing more. I have no need of a hospital. All I want to do is lie down for a while and then I’ll call for a car.’
He sounded more like himself. Domineering and organised. Maxie mulled over that unspoken demand for a place to lie down while she crept along the road in the direction of the cottage at the slowest speed a Ferrari had probably ever been driven at. Then the heavy rain was bouncing off the windscreen and visibility was poor. ‘All right…I’ll take you home with me—but just for an hour,’ she warned tautly.
‘You are so gracious.’
Maxie reddened, conscience-stricken when she recalled the amount of trouble he had taken to ensure that she was properly looked after when she was ill. But then Angelos had not been personally inconvenienced; he had paid others to take on the caring role. In fact, as she drove up the lane to the cottage, she knew she could not imagine Angelos allowing himself to be inconvenienced.
Her attention distracted, she was wholly unprepared to find herself driving through rippling water as she began to turn in at the front of the cottage. In alarm, she braked sharply, and without warning the powerful car went into a skid. ‘Oh, God!’ she gasped in horror as the front wheels went over the edge of the stream bank. The Ferrari tipped into the stream nose-first with a jarring thud and came to rest at an extreme angle.
‘God wasn’t listening, but at least we’re still alive,’ Angelos groaned as he reached over and switched off the engine.
‘I suppose you’re about to kick up a whole macho fuss now, and yap about women drivers,’ Maxie hissed, unclamping her locked fingers from the steering wheel.
‘I wouldn’t dare. Knowing my luck in your radius, I’d step out of the car and drown.’
‘The stream is only a couple of feet deep!’
‘I feel so comforted knowing that.’ With a powerful thrust of his arm, Angelos forced the passenger door open and staggered out onto the muddy bank. Then he reached in to haul her out with stunning strength.
‘I’m sorry… I got a fright when I saw that water.’
‘It was only a large puddle. What do you do when you see the sea?’
‘I thought the stream had flooded and broken its banks, and I wanted to be sure we didn’t go over the edge in the dark…that’s why I jumped on the brakes!’ Fumbling for her key, not wishing to dwell on quite how unsuccessful her evasive tactics had been, Maxie unlocked the battered front door and switched on the light.
Angelos lowered his wildly tousled dark head to peer, unimpressed, into the bare lounge with its two seater hard-backed settee. Without the fire lit or a decorative face-lift, it didn’t look very welcoming, she had to admit.
‘All right, upstairs is a bit more comfortable. You can lie down on my bed.’
‘I can hardly believe your generosity. Where’s the phone?’
Maxie frowned. ‘I don’t have one.’
Tangled wet black lashes swept up on stunned eyes. ‘That’s a joke?’
‘Surely you have a mobile phone?’
‘I must’ve dropped it in the street during the fight.’ With a mutter of frustrated Greek, Angelos started up the narrow staircase.
He was a little unsteady on his feet, and Maxie noted that fact anxiously. ‘I think you need a doctor, Angelos.’
‘Rubbish…just want to lie down—’
‘Duck your head!’ she warned a split second too late as he collided headfirst with the lintel above the bedroom door.
‘Oh, no,’ Maxie groaned in concert with him, and shot out both arms to support him as he reeled rather dangerously on the tiny landing. Hurriedly she guided him into the bedroom before he could do any further damage to himself.
‘There’s puddles on the floor,’ Angelos remarked, blinking rapidly.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Maxie told him, just as a big drop of water from somewhere above splashed down on her nose.
Aghast, she tipped back her head to gaze up at the vaulted wooden roof above, which she had thought was so much more attractive and unusual than a ceiling. Droplets of water were suspended in several places and there were puddles on the floorboards. The roof was leaking.
‘I’m in the little hovel in the woods,’ Angelos framed.
Maxie said a most unladylike word and darted over to the bed to check that it wasn’t wet. Mercifully it appeared to be occupying the only dry corner in the room, but she wrenched back the bedding to double-check. Angelos dropped down on the edge of the divan and tugged off his jacket. It fell in a puddle. She snatched up the garment and clutched it as she met dazed black eyes. ‘I shouldn’t have listened you. I should’ve taken you to Casualty.’
‘I have a very sore head and I am slightly disorientated. That is all.’ Angelos coined the assurance with arrogant emphasis. ‘Stop treating me like a child.’
‘How many fingers do you see?’ In her anxiety, Maxie stuck out her thumb instead of the forefinger she had intended.
‘I see one thumb,’ he said very drily. ‘Was that a trick question?’
&nb
sp; Flushing a deep pink, Maxie bridled as he yanked off his tie. ‘Do you have to undress?’
‘I am not lying down in wet clothes,’ Angelos informed her loftily.
‘I’ll leave you, then…well, I need to get some bowls for the drips anyway,’ Maxie mumbled awkwardly on her passage out through the door.
Just the thought of Angelos unclothed shot a shocking current of snaking heat right through her trembling body. It was only nervous tension, Maxie told herself urgently as she went downstairs, the result of delayed shock after that horrendous outbreak of masculine violence in the street. She had been really scared, but Angelos was too bone-deep macho and stupid to have been scared. However, she should have forced him to go to the local hospital…but how did you force a male as spectacularly stubborn as Angelos to do something he didn’t want to do, and surely there couldn’t be anything really serious wrong with him when he could still be so sarcastic?
In the scullery, she picked up a bucket and a mop, and then abandoned them to pour some disinfectant into a bowl of water instead. She needed to see close up how bad that cut was. Had he been unconscious for several seconds after the youths had run off? His eyes had been closed, those ridiculously long lashes down like black silk fans and almost hitting his cheekbones. Dear heaven, what was the matter with her? Her mind didn’t feel like her own any more.
Angelos was under her rosebud-sprigged sheets when she hesitantly entered the bedroom again. His eyes seemed closed. She moistened her lower lip with a nervous flick of her tongue. She took in the blatant virility of his big brown shoulders, the rough black curls of hair sprinkling what she could see of his powerful pectoral muscles and that vibrant golden skintone that seemed to cover all of him, and which looked so noticeable against her pale bedding…
‘You’re supposed to stay awake if you have concussion,’ she scolded sharply in response to those unnecessarily intimate observations. Stepping close to the bed, she jabbed at a big brown shoulder and swiftly withdrew her hand from the heat of him again as if she had been scalded, her fair skin burning.
Those amazing black eyes snapped open on her.
‘You’re bleeding all over my pillow,’ Maxie censured, her throat constricting as she ran completely out of breath.
‘I’ll buy you a new one.’
‘No, you buy nothing for me…and you lie still,’ she instructed unevenly. ‘I need to see that cut.’
With an embarrassingly unsteady hand and a pad of kitchen towelling, Maxie cleaned away the blood. As she exposed the small seeping wound, a beautifully shaped brown hand lifted and closed round the delicate bones of her wrist. ‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’
‘You might’ve been knifed or something. I still feel sick thinking about it. But I could’ve dealt with that kid on my own—’
‘I think not…his mates were already moving in to have some fun. Nor would it have cost them much effort to drag you round the corner down that alleyway—’
‘Well, I’m not about to thank you. If you had stayed away from me, it wouldn’t have happened,’ Maxie stated tightly. ‘I’d have stayed in the hotel until closing time and got a lift home with the barman. He lives a couple of miles on down the road.’
With that final censorious declaration, Maxie pulled herself free and took the bowl downstairs again. She would have to go back up and mop the floor but it was true, she was shaking like a leaf and her legs felt like jelly. Unfortunately it wasn’t all the result of shock. Seeing Angelos in her bed, wondering like a nervous adolescent how much, if anything, he was wearing, hadn’t helped.
Five minutes later she went back up, with a motley collection of containers to catch the drips and the mop and bucket. In silence, she did what had to be done, but she was horribly mortified by the necessity, not to mention furious with herself for dismissing the agent’s assessment of the cottage’s condition on the phone. This was the first time it had rained since she had moved in and clearly either a new roof or substantial repairs would be required to make the cottage waterproof before winter set in. It was doubtful that she could afford even repairs.
As each receptacle was finally correctly positioned to catch the drips from overhead, a cacophany of differing noises started up. Split, splat, splash, plop…
‘How are you feeling?’ Maxie asked thinly above that intrusive backdrop of constant drips.
‘Fantastically rich and spoilt. Indoors, water belongs in the bathroom or the swimming pool,’ Angelos opined with sardonic cool. ‘I can’t credit that you would prefer to risk drowning under a roof that leaks like a sieve sooner than come to me.’
‘Credit it. Nothing you could do or say would convince me otherwise. I don’t want to live with any man—’
‘I wasn’t actually asking you to live with me,’ Angelos delivered in gentle contradiction, his sensual mouth quirking. ‘I like my own space. I would buy you your own place and visit—’
An angry flush chased Maxie’s strained pallor. ‘I’m not for sale—’
‘Except for a wedding ring?’ Angelos vented a roughened laugh of cynical amusement. ‘Oh, yes, I got the message. Very naive, but daring. I may be obsessed with a need to possess that exquisite body that trembles with sexual hunger whenever I am close,’ he murmured silkily, reaching up with a confident hand to close his fingers over hers and draw her down beside him before she even registered what he was doing, ‘but, while I will fulfil any other desire or ambition with pleasure, that one is out of reach, pethi mou. Concentrate on the possible, not the wildly improbable.’
‘If you didn’t already have a head injury, I’d swing for you!’ Maxie slung fiercely. ‘Let go of me!’
In the controlled and easy gesture of a very strong male, Angelos released her with a wry smile. ‘At the end of the day, Leland did quite a number on your confidence, didn’t he? Oh, yes, I know that he dispatched you from the hospital and screeched for Jennifer. Suddenly you found yourself back on the street, alone and without funds. So I quite understand why you should decide that a husband would be a safer bet than a lover next time around. However, I am not Leland…’
Maxie stared down into those stunning dark golden eyes. Fear and fascination fought for supremacy inside her. She could feel the raw magnetism of him reaching out to entrap her and she knew her own weakness more and more with every passing second in his company. She hated him but she wanted him too, with a bone-deep yearning for physical contact that tormented her this close to him. She was appalled by the strength of his sexual sway over her, shattered that she could be so treacherously vulnerable with a male of his ilk.
‘Come here…stop holding back,’ Angelos urged softly. ‘Neither of us can win a battle like this. Do we not both suffer? I faithfully promise that I will never, ever take advantage of you as Leland. did—’
‘What are you trying to do right now?’ Maxie condemned strickenly.
‘Trying to persuade you that trusting me would be in your best interests. And I’m not laying a finger on you,’ Angelos added, as if he expected acclaim for that remarkable restraint.
And the terrible irony, she registered then, was that she wanted him to touch her. Her bright eyes pools of sapphire-blue dismay and hunger, she stared down at him. Reaching up to loosen the band confining her hair to the nape of her neck, Angelos trailed it gently free to wind long brown fingers into the tumbling strands and slowly tug her down to him.
‘But that’s not what you want either, is it?’ he said perceptively.
‘No…’ Her skin burning beneath the caress of the blunt forefinger that skated along her tremulous and full lower lip, she shivered violently. ‘But I won’t give in. This attraction means nothing to me,’ she swore raggedly. ‘It won’t influence my brain—’
‘What a heady challenge…’ Black eyes flaring with golden heat held her sensually bemused gaze.
‘I’m not a challenge, I’m a woman…’ Maxie fumbled in desperation to make her feelings clear but she didn’t have the words or, it seemed, the self-disciplin
e to pull back from his embrace.
‘A hell of a woman, to fight me like this,’ Angelos confirmed, with a thickened appreciation that made her heart pound like mad in her eardrums and a tide of disorientating dizziness enclose her. ‘A woman worth fighting for. If you could just rise above this current inconvenient desire to turn over a new leaf—’
‘But—’
‘No buts.’ Angelos leant up to brush his lips in subtle glancing punishment over her parted ones, scanning her with fierce sexual hunger and conviction. ‘You need me.’
‘No…’ she whispered feverishly.
‘Yes…’ Dipping his tongue in a snaking explorative flick into her open mouth, Angelos jolted her with such an overpowering stab of excitement, she almost collapsed down on top of him.
Pressing his advantage with a ruthless sense of timing, Angelos tumbled her the rest of the way and gathered her into his arms. She gasped again, ‘No.’
The palm curving over a pouting, swollen breast stilled. Her nipple was a hard, straining bud that ached and begged for his attention, and she let her swimming head drop down on the pillow while she fought desperately for control. She focused on him. The brilliant eyes, the strong nose, the ruthless mouth. And that appalling tide of painful craving simply mushroomed instead of fading.
‘No?’ Angelos queried lazily.
She inched forward like a moth to a candle flame, seekmg the heat and virility she could not resist, all thought suspended. He recognised surrender when he saw it, and with a wolfish smile of reward he closed his mouth hungrily over hers and she burned up like a shooting star streaking through the heavens at impossible speed, embracing destruction as if she had been born to seek it.
He curved back from her when her every sense was thrumming unbearably, her whole body shaking on a peak of frantic anticipation, and eased one hand beneath the T-shirt to curve it to her bare breasts. She whimpered and jerked, the most terrifying surge of hunger taking over as his expert fingers tugged on her tender nipples and then his caressing mouth went there instead. For long, timeless minutes, Maxie was a shuddering wreck of writhing, gasping response, clutching at him, clutching at his hair, her denim-clad hips rising off the bed in helpless invitation.