by Lynne Graham
Maxie’s stiffness gave way. Closing the distance between them, she gave the older man a comforting hug. ‘You loved me. I always knew that. It made up for a lot,’ she told him frankly. ‘You did the best you could.’
‘I hit rock-bottom when I saw you having to dance to the tune of that old coot, Leland Coulter.’ Russ Kendall shook his head with bitter regret. ‘There was no way I could avoid facing up to how low I’d sunk and how much I’d dragged you down. I leeched off you, off everyone. All I lived for was the next game, the next bet—’
Maxie drew him up short there. ‘Angelos says you’ve got a job. Tell me about that,’ she encouraged.
For the past year he had been working as a salesman for a northern confectionery firm. It was now eighteen months since he had last laid a bet. He still attended weekly meetings with other former gamblers.
Maxie told him that the cottage no longer had a sitting tenant. Her father frowned in surprise, and then slowly he smiled. Rather apprehensively, he then admitted that he had met someone he was hoping to marry. He would sell the cottage and put the proceeds towards buying a house. Myrtle, he explained, had some savings of her own, and it was a matter of pride that he should not bring less to the relationship.
Now he was middle-aged, she registered, her father finally wanted the ordinary things that other people wanted. Security, self-respect, to be loved, appreciated. And wasn’t that exactly what she had always wanted for herself? Her father had needed her forgiveness and she had needed to shed her bitter memories. As they talked, her gratitude to Angelos for engineering such a reconciliation steadily increased. Russ had built a new life and she wished him well with her whole heart.
‘You’ve got yourself a good bloke in Angelos,’ her father commented with a nod as he took his leave. ‘I shouldn’t like to cross him, though.’
Maxie was mopping her eyes when Angelos reappeared. She didn’t look at him. ‘This has been a heck of morning… but I’m really grateful that you found Dad for me. It’s like a whole big load of worry has dropped off my shoulders. Tell me, would you have brought us together again if he’d still been down on the skids?’
From the corner of her eye, she saw Angelos still. ‘Not immediately,’ he confessed honestly. ‘I would have tried to get him some help first. But be wouldn’t have come if he hadn’t sorted himself out. He wouldn’t have had the courage to face you.’
Angelos curved a supportive hand round her spine and walked her towards the door. ‘We have a helicopter to catch.’
‘Where on earth are we going?’
‘Surprise…’
‘I thought Dad was my surprise.’
‘Only part of it.’ He urged her up a flight of stairs and they emerged onto the roof, where a helicopter waited. Maxie grimaced and gave him a look of reproach which he pretended not to notice.
He held her hand throughout the flight. Maxie was forced to admit that it wasn’t so bad. She was even persuaded to look out of the windows once or twice. But she still closed her eyes and prayed when they started coming in to land. Angelos restored her to solid ground again with careful hands. ‘You’re doing really great,’ he told her admiringly.
Only then did Maxie open her eyes. She gaped. A hundred yards away stood a very large and imposing nineteenth-century country house surrounded by a gleaming sea of luxury cars. Three other helicopters were parked nearby. ‘Where are we? What’s going on?’
‘I did once mention having a house in the country but you were ill at the time,’ Angelos conceded with a wolfish smile. ‘Welcome to the wedding reception you never had, Mrs Petronides…’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Maxie prompted unevenly.
‘All my relatives and all my friends are waiting to meet you,’ Angelos revealed. ‘And the advantage of inviting them for lunch is that they all have to go home before dinner. Two weeks ago, the only reason I agreed to hold fire on announcing our marriage was that I hadn’t the slightest desire to share you with other people. I wanted you all to myself for a while—’
‘All your relatives…all your friends?’
‘Maxie…this little celebration has been in the pipeline for two weeks. The invitations went out while we were in Greece.’ He hesitated and cast her a rueful glance. ‘I did ask your father to join us but he preferred not to.’
Maxie nodded without surprise and wondered absently why they were dawdling so much on their passage towards the house. ‘Was Dad the something that came up yesterday?’
‘I went up to Manchester to see him. That took up quite a few hours and then I came back here for the night. I wanted to check everything was ready for us.’ Angelos stilled her steps altogether, casting an odd, frustrated glance of expectancy up at the sky.
‘What’s wrong…?’
The whine of an aircraft approaching brought a smile back to Angelos’s impatient dark features. As a low-flying plane approached over the trees, he banded both arms round Maxie and turned her round. ‘Look up,’ he urged.
Maxie’s eyes widened. In the wake of the strange trail of pink smoke left by the plane, words appeared to be forming.
‘That’s an I,’ Angelos informed her helpfully. ‘And that’s an L and an O and a V—’
‘Even I can read letters that big!’ Maxie snapped.
The words ‘I love you’ stood there in the sky, picked out in bright pink. Maxie’s jaw dropped.
Somewhat pained by this lack of response, Angelos breathed, ‘I wanted you to know that I am proud of my feelings for you…and it was the only way I could think of doing it.’
Never in Maxie’s wildest dreams would it have occurred to her that Angelos would do something so public and so deeply uncool. ‘You love me?’ she whispered weakly.
‘You ought to know that by now!’ Angelos launched in frustration. ‘I’ve been tying myself in knots for weeks trying to show you how much I care!’
Maxie surveyed him with eyes brimming with happiness, but was conscious of a very slight sense of female incomprehension. ‘Angelos…couldn’t you just say the words?’
‘You weren’t ready to hear them. You had a very low opinion of me…and, let me tell you, few men would’ve emerged from reading that written character assassination of yours with much in the way of hope!’ Angelos asserted with a feeling shudder.
Maxie was aghast. ‘You found my list—?’
‘How could you write all those things about me?’
‘There was no name on it, so if you recognised the traits…’ Maxie fell silent and studied him with dismayed and sympathetic eyes. ‘Oh, Angelos…you kept quiet all this time, and that must’ve killed you—’
‘I used that list as a blueprint for persuading you that I wasn’t the man you imagined I was.’
‘And you improved so much,’ Maxie completed rather tactlessly.
With a helpless groan, Angelos hauled her close and kissed her with devouring passion. Maxie’s impressionable heart went crazy. She submitted to being crushed with alacrity and hugged him tight, finally resting her golden head down on his broad shoulder as she struggled to catch her breath again. ‘Oh, dear, I was the tart who thought you were great in bed and that was all…you were playing games with me when you said that, Angelos!’ she condemned.
‘That is really rich…coming from a wife who announced she preferred to be a mistress—’
‘Only after being told she would be perfect in that role—’
‘Perfect wife, perfect mistress, perfect…you are the love of my life,’ Angelos confessed rather raggedly. ‘Why the hell did I arrange the reception for today?’
Maxie squinted across the sea of big cars at the house. A lot of faces were looking out of the windows. But she didn’t squirm. She threw her head high. Angelos loved her. The one and only love of his life? She felt ten feet tall. She would never, ever, no matter how long she lived, tell him how utterly naff that pink trail in the sky had been—particularly not when he was so pleased with himself for having come up with the idea.
‘I love you too,’ she confided as they threaded a passage through the parked cars on their way to the impressive front doors that already stood wide for their entrance. ‘I really don’t think I ought to tell you, but it wasn’t the new improved you that did the trick entirely. I got sort of irrationally attached to you even before I wrote the list.’
‘How can you tell me you love me with all these people hovering?’ Angelos slung in a gritty hiss of reproach, but he smiled and their eyes met and that devastating smile of his grew even more brilliant.
‘I want you to meet my wife,’ Angelos announced a few minutes later, with so much pride and pleasure that Maxie felt her eyes prickle.
A whole host of people lined up to greet them. They were mobbed. At one stage it was something of a surprise to find herself looking down on Leland Coulter’s balding little head, and then meeting his faded, discomfited blue eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he breathed tightly.
‘I made him sorry,’ his wife, Jennifer, said very loudly, and Leland flinched and seemed to shrink into himself. ‘Everyone knows the whole story now. There’s no fool like an old fool.’
The older woman shook hands with brisk efficiency and passed on.
Somewhat paralysed by that encounter, Maxie whispered to Angelos, ‘I feel so sorry for him now.’
‘Don’t you dare…if it hadn’t been for Leland, we’d have been together three years sooner!’ Angelos responded without pity.
‘I couldn’t have coped with you at nineteen.’
‘I never knew anyone learn to cope with me faster,’ Angelos countered, guiding her through the crush to a quiet corner.
Maxie focused on her friend, Liz, in delighted surprise. Petting Bounce, she sat down beside her. ‘How did you get here?’ she demanded.
‘Angelos phoned me last night. We travelled down in a limousine this morning. Bounce was most impressed. Now, didn’t I tell you that man loved you? Oh, dear, is he listening? ’ Liz said with comic dismay.
‘Your senses are so much more acute than Maxie’s,’ Angelos told Liz cheerfully. ‘To convince her, I had to hire a plane to spell out “I love you” in the sky.’
‘How did that feel?’ Liz asked Maxie eagerly.
‘It felt…it felt absolutely fantastic,’ Maxie swore. ‘It was so imaginative, so unexpected, so—’
‘Naff?’ Angelos slotted in tautly.
‘No, it was the moment I realised that I loved you most.’ And truthfully it had been, when he had unerringly betrayed to her just how hard he found it to put his pride on the line and say those three little words before she said them.
Lunch was a vast buffet served in the ballroom by uniformed waiters. Maxie sipped champagne and drifted about on an ecstatic cloud with Angelos’s arm curved possessively round her. She met his aunts and his uncles and his cousins and his second cousins and his third cousins, and all the names just went right over her head.
And then, when the band struck up the music, rising to the role expected of the bridal couple, they circled the floor and the dancing began. Given an excuse to remain constantly within Angelos’s hold, Maxie was initially content. Curving herself round him like a vine, she breathed in the hot, familiar scent of his body and inevitably turned weak with longing. ‘Any sign of anyone leaving yet?’ she kept on asking hopefully.
At last a trickle of departures led to a generalised flood. They saw Liz back out to the limo. Then Maxie and Angelos mounted the stairs hand in hand at a stately pace. ‘When did you realise you were in love with me?’ she pressed.
‘When you had the chickenpox and I still couldn’t wait to take you home.’
‘But you weren’t prepared to admit it—’
‘Torture wouldn’t have made me confess I was that vulnerable. This is our bedroom.’ Angelos cast wide a door with a flourish.
‘“Our” has a warm sound,’ Maxie savoured. ‘I still can’t believe you love me…’
‘You wouldn’t have had to wait so long to find out if you had kept quiet on the beach the morning after I got drunk.’ In exasperation Angelos framed her surprised face with loving hands. ‘I was ready to tell you. Since I was painfully aware that I had got everything wrong, and I was feeling unusually humble, I was planning to go for the sympathy vote…and what did you do?’
‘I told you about my godmother’s will… I think I’ll give my share to Nancy’s favourite children’s charity.’ She stared dizzily into dark eyes blazing with love and gave him a glorious smile. ‘I had to tell you about the will some time, but I was just trying to save face. I didn’t want you to realise how much I loved you—’
‘You’re a total dreamer.’
‘I’m the love of your life,’ Maxie reminded him rather smugly as she flicked loose his tie and slid his jacket down off his broad shoulders with the intent air of one unwrapping a wonderful parcel. ‘And you’re the love of mine.’
Angelos brought her down on the four-poster bed with a husky laugh of amusement. ‘Let me remind you of what you said in your list. Chauvinistic, bad-tempered, selfish, unromantic, insensitive, domineering—’
‘A woman always reserves the right to change her mind,’ Maxie inserted before he could get really warmed up.
Black eyes were burnished to pure gold as he met her dancing eyes. ‘You may be gorgeous…but I think it was your mind I fell in love with…all those snappy replies and sneaky moves, agape mou.’
‘To think I once thought you were cold.’ Maxie ran a tender loving hand over his hair-roughened chest. ‘How many children are we going to have?’ she asked.
Angelos gave her a startled smile of appreciation that turned her heart over and inside out. ‘You want my baby?’
Maxie nodded. The prospect just made her melt
‘You really are tremendous,’ Angelos breathed hoarsely.
And then he took her readily parted lips with urgent, speaking hunger and the passion took over, gloriously reaffirming their love for each other.
Ten months later, they had their first child. Maxie gave birth to a baby girl with blue eyes as bright and bossy as her own. Angelos took one look at his daughter and he just adored her too.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-5153-3
MARRIED TO A MISTRESS
First North American Publication 1999.
Copyright © 1998 by Lynne Graham.
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