Angel Of Darkness

And for a fraction of a second Angelo’s expression had one hundred percent convinced her that he knew exactly what she was talking about and that he was well aware of his father’s extra-marital relationship with another woman. Kelda had taken him by surprise and his complete denial of that relationship had come just that little bit too late to be plausible.

Angelo had known all right. And no doubt, Angelo hadn’t seen anything the slightest bit immoral in Tomaso’s behaviour. In his world, married men with mistresses were far from unusual. But that same knowledge would have destroyed her mother. Now, Kelda found herself wondering if indeed her mother had at least suspected Tomaso of having another woman. It was quite possible that Daisy would have kept that information to herself, rather than share it with her teenage daughter.

‘What did you tell her?’ Angelo demanded ferociously.

‘I told her nothing...not that that is any of your business,’ Kelda stressed.

‘When my father’s happiness is at stake, it is my business.’

‘I doubt if he’d thank you for your interference...and if my mother knew that you were here threatening me like this—’

‘Are you planning to tell her?’ Angelo had the stillness of a jungle cat about to spring.

Kelda wouldn’t have dreamt of telling Daisy, but she was furiously angry and she lifted a bare pale shoulder in a deliberately provocative gesture. ‘I might...on the other hand I might not,’ she said sweetly, incandescent green eyes flaming at him. ‘You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you, Angelo?’

He had gone satisfyingly white beneath his bronzed skin, his facial bones harshly set. Kelda smiled, widely, brilliantly, smugly. It really had been very foolish of Angelo to come here and threaten her. Astoundingly foolish...astoundingly out of character for so noted a tactician. One lean brown hand was curled into his fist and without warning he stood up again.

‘I came here tonight to appeal to your better nature—’

‘I haven’t got one, Angelo...not where you’re concerned,’ she said shakily but truthfully.

‘I could break you with one hand,’ Angelo savoured, eyes as treacherous as black ice on a wintry night, fixed to her with savage intensity. ‘And I will...I don’t mind waiting a little while...a very little while. And while I’m waiting, you’ll be waiting too...’

Icy fingers were walking up her unbelievably taut backbone. Angelo hated her, he really did hate her. And she knew why. It lay unspoken between them, untouched but raw. She shivered, no longer able to meet that hard, dark scrutiny. Had she gone overboard? Should she for once have kept her mouth shut? But why should she stand and take abuse from Angelo?

Her front door shut with a soft click. Shaking all over now, released from the spell he always cast, Kelda collapsed down into the nearest seat. She felt sick. He had called her poisonous, vindictive, and yet all she wanted was her mother’s happiness. Had it been selfish to make it clear that if Daisy married Tomaso again she was unlikely to see so much of her adored daughter?

But hadn’t that only been the truth? She couldn’t stand Angelo, and the savage hostility between them would be painfully obvious to both their parents. It would hardly add to connubial bliss, so naturally her contact with her mother would have to take place only when Angelo was elsewhere. Was that her fault? Was that so horribly selfish of her? Tears lashed her eyelids in a scorching surge. The memories were coming back...

Yes, she had bitterly resented her mother’s remarriage all those years ago. Had she had a chance to get to know Tomaso in advance, had she even known of his existence, maybe she would have reacted differently.

The sudden material change in their lifestyle hadn’t helped. Kelda had been parcelled off to an exclusive boarding school where her accent had provoked her classmates to pitying laughter. Her friends, her great-aunt, everything that had given her security had been wrenched away all at once. Instead of seeing more of her mother, she had actually seen less of her. Was it really any wonder that she had found it so hard to adapt?

The worst shock had been the discovery that, when their parents were abroad, Angelo was expected to take responsibility for her. Angelo ruled with an iron rod. When she was expelled from that first school for going ‘over the wall’ one night on a dare, it had been Angelo who took charge and reinstalled her in a convent day school with more rules and regulations than Holloway. It had been Angelo who took her apart when she failed her exams, Angelo who forced her to spend several fruitless vacations swotting with private tutors as bored and fed up as she was.

Tomaso had seemed to find his son’s assumption of authority amusing. When he was around, which had been rarely, he hadn’t interfered. Her mother had had a tendency to slip out of the room when Kelda appealed to her for back-up. Defying Angelo to her last gasp, Kelda had refused to work. She had frequently been in trouble at school but she hadn’t cared because for the first time in her life she had been really popular.

At sixteen, Angelo had trailed her screeching out of her first boyfriend’s car. She had sneaked out on the date, conscious that her mother would think that Josh at twenty-two was too old for her. The evening had been spent at a ten-pin bowling alley...nothing could have been more innocuous. Josh had parked his car a hundred yards before the entrance of the house on the way back. He had been on the brink of giving her a kiss...only on the brink, mind you, when all of a sudden the door was wrenched open and she was forcibly hauled out of Josh’s reach by Angelo.

‘Approach her again and I’ll break every one of your fingers,’ he had told Josh with a chilling smile. That had been the end of that, and the word had gone out on her locally. Josh had talked. Date Kelda and you tangled with Angelo Rossetti. Not surprisingly, it had destroyed her social life. Even her girlfriends had laughed and, not content with humiliating her, Angelo had told Tomaso and Daisy, ensuring that what little freedom she had had was even more severely curtailed. He had made Josh sound like a potential rapist.

Was it any wonder that she had hated Angelo? Even now, it still stuck in her throat that she had had to endure all those years of Angelo’s moralising lectures. What about his own reputation?

From birth, he had made headlines. When Tomaso and his far richer Brazilian wife had split up, Angelo had been the most fought-over little boy in the Western world. Tomaso had lost, but when his ex-wife died he had fought for custody again, this time against Angelo’s grandmother. Tomaso had won the final battle, but he hadn’t managed to subdue the explosive temperament that powered his son.

Angelo’s teenage exploits had shocked Europe. At the age of eighteen, he had inherited his late mother’s millions, and for several years afterwards he had run wild. He had lived the self-indulgent life of the super-rich playboy. His insatiable appetite for beautiful women had been notorious. His sex-life might have become considerably more discreet over the last decade but husbands still paled in Angelo’s vicinity.

As her mind threatened to leap forward to her eighteenth birthday, Kelda tensed and stopped her recollections stone dead in their tracks. She went to bed, suppressing all thoughts on the subject of Angelo’s threats...after all, what could he possibly do to her?

Dawn was lightening the sky beyond the curtains when she woke up, shivering and perspiring, an hour later. She had been wrestling with the duvet, probably crying out. The fear was still with her even in the light of day. The nightmare had been so real.

Getting up, she poured herself a glass of mineral water in the kitchen. On wobbly legs, she sank down at the breakfast-bar and stared into space. She had been allowed to throw a party to celebrate her eighteenth birthday. Owing to her exams, the party had been held several months after her actual birthday. There had been two events to celebrate. Her birthday and the end of her schooldays. Daisy and Tomaso had gone out for the evening but naturally Angelo had had no such tact. Strange to think that some hours after that wretched party had started she had been desperately, pathetically grateful that Angelo had stayed home.

Before the party had started, Angelo had staggered her by complimenting her on her appearance. Ignoring her dropped jaw and looking oddly self-conscious, he had then taken himself off to his suite of rooms on the far side of the house. He had just come home after a long period working abroad and it must have been almost a year since she had seen him. After that astonishing compliment, she had actually wondered if her stormy relationship with Angelo was miraculously about to improve with his acceptance that she was now an adult.

She had promised that there would be no alcohol at the party but most of her guests had brought wine. Reluctant to be the odd one out, Kelda had had a couple of glasses. Half a dozen boys had shown up on the doorstep midway through the evening. One of them had been the brother of one of her best friends, so she had let them in.

It had happened in the library. Some people had drifted in there and she had had to shoo them frantically out again because the party had been getting rowdy and there were far too many valuable objects in that room. She should have called for Angelo’s help then, because she had known that some people had had far too much to drink. But most of those people had been her friends.

She had been switching out a lamp when she was grabbed from behind. Having believed that she was alone in the room, she had screamed with fright. For a moment, she had assumed it was one of the boys she knew fooling around, but when she was dragged down on the carpet by bruising hands and a crude voice started telling her in the kind of language she had never heard before exactly what he was going to do to a ‘snobby little cow’ like her, she had been terrified out of her wits.

He had been so strong. Until that night she had never properly appreciated just how much stronger the average male was in comparison to a woman. She had gone wild, trying to kick, trying to claw with her nails while he yanked her dress up round her waist and bit horribly at the exposed slope of her breasts. He had hit her a stunning blow across the side of her head and then he had put his hand over her mouth, depriving her of the ability to scream. She’d been involved in a desperate struggle when the light went on and all of a sudden she was freed.

She had thrown up on the priceless Persian rug at Angelo’s feet. Her assailant had taken immediate flight. She had not seen his face and, strangely, Angelo had made no attempt to stop him. He had simply swung on his heel and walked back out of the room to tell everyone that the party was over. At that point, she had been too hysterical to realise that Angelo had not understood what he had interrupted.

Stumbling and crying, she had fled upstairs to her bedroom. She had stripped and got into the shower, needing to wash away the taint of the hands that had touched her. There had been bruises on her breasts and a lump the size of a small egg on the side of her head where she had been struck. The attack had terrified her and she had been sitting still shaking on the side of her bed when Angelo knocked and entered.

‘A promiscuous little tramp’, he had called her and, still suffering from the effects of shock, Kelda had looked back at him numbly, unable even to credit that he could think she had been writhing about on the library floor in the dark out of choice.

‘He attacked m-me!’ she had gasped. ‘He was trying to rape me...’

And she still remembered the way Angelo had looked at her. He had been so pale, so rigid with tension. She had recognised the seething anger he was struggling to restrain. It had glittered dangerously in his piercing dark eyes like a violent storm warning. For a foolish moment she had actually thought that he believed her and that he was angry with himself, angry that he had allowed her assailant to get away instead of calling the police to report an assault. But his next words had demolished that hope.

‘You disgust me,’ he had breathed in a savage undertone. ‘I will never forget what I saw tonight.’

He had not even given her a fair hearing, had not hesitated in choosing to believe the very worst of her. His response, following so closely upon the attack she had endured had reduced her to stricken sobs. It had been some time before she pulled herself together again, and then the anger and the fear of what he would tell her mother and Tomaso had assailed her.

She hadn’t thought about what she did next. Had she known what would happen, she would have stayed where she was, safe in her own room...but she had been distressed and frightened and helplessly determined that Angelo should hear her side of the story and believe her. She hadn’t stopped even to put her dressing-gown on.

She had knocked on Angelo’s door. Although she had been able to see faint light beneath the door, there had been no answer. She had crept in. The bedside lamp had cast a soft pool of light over Angelo. He had been asleep and about that point, her memory became confused between what she did recall and what, for a long time afterwards, she had refused to admit even to herself.

A white sheet had been riding dangerously low on one lean golden hip. He had been naked and she had been strangely hesitant about waking him. Indeed now, when she was of an age when she had learnt to be truthful at least with herself, she could admit that she had been mesmerised by his sheer masculine beauty. For the very first time, she had reacted to Angelo’s physical allure. He had not been Tomaso’s son, her hatefully arrogant stepbrother, who just so happened to be very good-looking. No, it had been much more personal, much more intimate than that, and the sensations Angelo had aroused in her had been painfully new to her experience.

He had opened his eyes, pools of passionate gold. He had not appeared to be still half asleep. But perhaps he had been. Something had flamed in that golden gaze that raked over her while she had hovered there in stupid paralysis and he had reached up with two very determined hands and pulled her down on to that bed with him.

‘Carissima...bella mia,’ he had breathed passionately against her lips in welcome, suggesting that he had inexplicably mistaken her for someone else. He could not possibly have been addressing those endearments to Kelda.

‘Angelo!’ she had gasped incredulously before he silenced her with the heat of his mouth.

It had not been to her credit that she had neither screamed nor raised a finger to fight him off. But the terrible truth was that she had had no thought of denying him. In fact she could not recall a single thought of anything passing through her blitzed mind during those fevered few minutes.

The explosion of desire, of need, of want had been instantaneous. The stab of his tongue into the moist interior of her mouth had drowned her in waves of intense physical pleasure. She had been reduced to mindless compliance within seconds. Angelo kissed with electrifying eroticism. She had wrapped her arms round him with shameless abandonment and the spell had only been broken when a thunderous male voice rudely interrupted them.

‘You set me up!’ Angelo had hissed incomprehensibly, staring down at her with cold, embittered fury.

Even six years after the event, Kelda still got hot and cold reliving that hideous moment when Angelo had released her and she had dazedly focused on Tomaso standing at the foot of the bed. Ignoring her, Tomaso had been ranting at his son in staccato Italian. Normally a mild-mannered man, Angelo’s father had been shocked and completely enraged by the scene he had interrupted.

But then, oddly enough, Tomaso had briefly appeared to calm down. He had even managed a rather grim smile as he said something very clipped. Whatever Angelo had said in response had wiped that smile right back off his face again and two seconds later Tomaso had been ripping off his own jacket, draping it round Kelda’s cowering shoulders and practically trailing her out of the room while throwing words that had sounded positively violent over his shoulder at his son. His precious, much beloved son...