expect it to be…you know…the first time…’
The husky confidence made him freeze. ‘Theos! Can it be true…?’ He scanned her face and knew. ‘Dear God, it is.’
A man who prided himself on his control, he couldn’t believe what he had just done. If it hadn’t been for the storm he…
She reached for him and she looked hurt when he jerked back avoiding contact.
He had never wanted a woman so much in his life.
‘You’re mad with me…?’
He looked at the tears trembling on her eyelashes and cursed slowly and fluently under his breath.
‘No, I’m mad with me,’ he told her as he picked her up.
She lay passively in his arms as he carried her across the sand dunes to where his car was parked in a quiet lane. The place was totally deserted as he dumped her in the front seat.
‘Are you kidnapping me?’ There was no alarm in her voice, just a lazy curiosity.
‘No, I’m warming you up,’ he said, switching on the engine and turning up the heater full blast.
‘Maybe I should take off my wet things…?’
The only wet thing she was wearing was a black swimsuit with a zip up the front. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ he said, trying hard not to think about that strategically placed zip. One tug…
‘I don’t think I should have got in a car with a stranger,’ she observed absently as he draped a jacket that had been in the back seat over her shoulders.
‘You didn’t get in. I put you in.’
‘So you did. I’m warmer.’ She leaned back in the deeply upholstered seat with a sigh. ‘You know, I don’t think I’m quite myself,’ she confided.
That makes two of us. ‘You nearly drowned.’
Her eyes, which had been closing, suddenly flickered open. Tawny eyes scanned his face. ‘You kissed me.’ She pressed a hand to her soft lips. ‘I liked it.’
Beside her he didn’t dare move; he didn’t trust himself to speak. The ferocious tension in his body was so extreme that he remembered the bones in his face aching.
‘I noticed,’ he admitted.
She lifted a hand and ran a finger down his lean cheek. ‘Are you going to do it again?’
‘You’re in shock.’
‘I’m something, but not that. I think you saved my life. How can I repay you?’
He caught hold of her wrist and dragged her hand from his face. ‘Well, you can cut that out, for a start.’
She flinched visibly at the cutting response. After a second’s hurt incomprehension, a tide of mortified colour washed over her face.
‘Theos! Don’t look at me like that,’ he pleaded throatily.
She bit her lip and fixed her eyes on her hands, which lay clenched in her lap.
‘I’m s…sorry,’ she stuttered. ‘I really don’t know what came over me.’
‘The same thing that came over me. Where do you live? I’ll take you home.’ And after that he was going to drive away in the opposite direction.
He didn’t do virgins.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘CAN we have the ball back, mister?’
The request dragged Angolos back from a time he mostly succeeded in blanking from his mind.
To his way of thinking, no useful purpose could be served from preserving the memory of a time when he had allowed himself to be humiliated and deceived, except possibly to learn a lesson. He would never trust a woman again.
Had it amused Georgette to see him oblivious to her affair? Had she laughed with her lover as they had planned to pass the child off as his…?
A muscle clenched in Angolos’s lean cheek as he pulled a hand across his brow to wipe off the moisture that clung to his tanned skin. It had started raining and he hadn’t noticed; neither had he noticed until now that he was within a hundred yards of the gate that led to the garden of the Kemp house, a slightly battered timber cottage with a tin roof. Bending, he picked up the ball that lay at his feet and threw it back to the family playing a game of beach cricket.
‘Good throw,’ somebody acknowledged cheerily before they returned to their game.
Angolos headed for the gate. It creaked on the rusty hinges as he pushed it open. His lips curled in distaste as his hand rested on the peeling paintwork. At one time he had found the shabby chic of the Kemp home, so totally unlike what he was accustomed to, charming. Now he just found it, well…shabby.
The family he had never found charming and the feeling was mutual. Her relatives had come across as a bunch of xenophobic idiots who had been appalled at the idea of one of their number marrying a foreigner. Later, when Georgette had confided that her mother had run off with a Greek waiter, her family’s attitude had been more understandable.
His critical glance skimmed the semi-screened area. The cottage and garden looked the same as he remembered; the only thing that hadn’t been here four years ago was the clutter of children’s toys. Angolos’s dark eyes were drawn against his will to the evidence of childish occupation…the tricycle, the plastic toy cars, the bucket of shells gathered from the beach.
His classical profile tautened as he averted his gaze and strode purposefully to the door. There was absolutely no point prolonging this.
The door was opened before he had an opportunity to announce his arrival. His raised hand fell to his side as he looked at the woman framed in the open doorway. She was, he judged, somewhere in her mid-fifties, her grey-streaked dark hair was cut in a short modern crop, she had intelligent blue eyes and an interesting rather than attractive face.
She was a stranger to Angolos.
‘Hello, I’m—’
‘Good gracious, you’re Nicky’s father.’
Angolos was so surprised by her automatic assumption that his response was uncharacteristically unguarded. ‘No, I’m not anyone’s father,’ he ejaculated bitterly.
‘Nonsense, of course you are,’ she dismissed, dealing him an amused look.
Angolos was taken aback by this response. ‘I will not argue the point with you.’
The woman scanned his face, then threw back her head and laughed, not intimidated by the hauteur in his manner.
Angolos liked that.
In his position there were too many people ready to say what he wanted to hear. They had been saying what he wanted to hear since the day he’d stepped into his dead father’s shoes
