but impossible to ignore, marking the difference between all of them, and her. She’d always been on the outside looking in, no matter how many Christmases she spent with them, pretending. The Jacksons were the only family she had, but that didn’t make them hers. All she had, for her sins, was Chantelle.
Angel wished, not for the first time, that she’d gone on to university. That she’d dedicated herself to an education, a career—something. But she’d been so very pretty at sixteen, blessed with her mother’s infamous blagging skills and the body to back them up. She’d been confident that she could make her own way in the world, and she had, one way or another. She’d talked her way into more jobs than she could count since then, none of them long-lasting, but she’d always told herself that that was how she liked it. No ties. Nothing that could hold her back should she need to move on. She’d been muse and model to a fashion designer, had run her own retail shop for a year or two, and could usually pick up some kind of modeling job or another in a pinch. It was always a struggle, but she paid her rent and her bills, and often had a little bit left over, as well.
Not fifty thousand quid, of course. Not anything even remotely close to that.
Her stomach heaved, and she pressed her fist against her belly as if that would settle it, by force. By her will alone. What was she supposed to do? Declare bankruptcy? Have her mother arrested for identity fraud? However angry she was, however hurt, again, she couldn’t quite see taking either route. One was humiliating and unfair. The other was unthinkable.
Right, she thought then, her usual cool and practical nature taking over at last, shoving the unfamiliar lashings of self-pity aside. Enough whingeing, Angel. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity tonight. Pull yourself together and use it!
Angel helped herself to a flute of champagne from a passing waiter, took a restorative sip and squared her shoulders. She decided to ignore the faint trembling in her hands. She was Angel Tilson. She was tough—she’d had to be, the whole of her life. She did not break at the first sign of adversity—or even at fifty thousand pounds’ worth of signs. She did not recognize defeat. As Bobby had always said—while throwing the odd drink down his throat, but the sentiment was the same regardless—defeat was nothing more than an opportunity to succeed the next time. And the glorious thing about having no options was that she had absolutely no choice but to succeed.
“So,” she murmured to herself, fiercely, “I bloody well will.”
Her reasons for going ahead and playing this game might have been desperate, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a game she was very good at playing. How could she not be, she thought with something like dark humor. It was in her genes.
She ran her free hand over the curve of her hip, making sure her dress was in place, sticking like glue to the tight, toned curves she’d inherited directly from her mother. She could not quite bring herself to be grateful to Chantelle for that little gift. Not quite. Not tonight. The dress was strapless, short and black as sin—and pretended to be decorous while instead showing off every mouthwatering inch of what was, she knew, her only weapon and greatest asset. Her body.
Nearby, a gaunt-faced older man with centuries of breeding stamped into his sunken bones and his so-proper-it-hurt wife stared at her as if she’d committed some hideous breach of etiquette right there in front of them. Anything was possible, of course, but Angel knew she’d successfully kept a low profile here at Allegra’s party—so outside her realm of experience was it to find herself in a palace. The well-bred couple averted their eyes in apparent horror, and Angel bit back a laugh.
She’d leave the truly appalling behavior to the rest of the Jackson family, as she suspected her half sister and stepsiblings, all seven gathered together under this much-too-elegant roof, were more than up to the task. It was, in fact, a Jackson family tradition to stir up scandal wherever they went.
Her half sister, Izzy, had recently been involved in a highly publicized engagement that had ended so dramatically and so openly—at the altar, no less, flashbulbs popping—that Angel had cynically assumed it was all part of her younger sister’s increasingly desperate bid for attention from the less and less interested press. Izzy was as bad as their mother, who was no doubt also in this huge crowd somewhere right now, flinging her mane of blonde hair about like a woman half her age, inevitably dressed in something scandalous and up to who knew what. They could even be up to their usual mischief together—a prospect Angel couldn’t bear to think about any further.
She, on the other hand, had to be just well-behaved enough to catch the right sort of eye—and just badly behaved enough to make sure that eye didn’t stray. When the gaunt older man snuck an appreciative second look at her figure behind his wife’s stiff and scandalized back, Angel smiled in satisfaction. The game was on.
She prowled around the edge of the great gala event, fortified with another glass of the remarkably good champagne, scanning the party for any possibilities. After some consideration and a long look at an obviously wealthy-looking sort with an unfortunate nose that could, in a pinch, double as a bridge over the English Channel, she admitted that she was, regrettably, not that desperate. Not yet.
Looking around, she also automatically excluded any men with women already hanging off of them, or even standing too close to them, as she didn’t have the time or inclination to compete, and anyway, she wasn’t at all interested in someone else’s husband.
She might have descended to following in her mother’s footsteps and becoming a shameless gold digger, she thought piously, but she did have some standards.
She took care to avoid any of the Jackson family, Chantelle and Izzy included—or perhaps especially—as she moved through the crowd. Those she was particularly close to—like the bride-to-be Allegra herself or Ben, the eldest Jackson sibling and as close to a big brother as Angel was likely to get—she was determined to avoid at all costs. She couldn’t handle any sort of show of concern, not from the people she actually considered near enough to family. She didn’t want either of them to ask her how she was doing, because she might accidentally let the awful truth slip out in all its ugliness, and that would hardly put her in the right frame of mind to catch a husband, would it?
Not that she had any idea what frame of mind that was meant to be, she thought wryly, slipping behind another pillar to avoid a tight scrum of what, to her untrained eye, looked like a pack of highly disapproving priests. Or possibly bankers.
And that was when she saw him.
He was lurking—there was no better word for it—almost in the shadows of the next pillar, all by himself, presenting Angel with a view of his commanding profile. He was … magnificent. That was also the best word for it. For him. She paused for a moment, letting her eyes travel all over him. His shoulders were wide and strong, and his torso looked like packed steel beneath a suit that should have been elegant, but on his lean, rugged frame was instead … something else. Something that whispered of great power, ruthlessly and not altogether seamlessly contained. He stood with his feet apart and his hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers, and she got the impression that there was something almost belligerent in that stance, something profoundly dangerous.
Every hair on her body seemed to stand on end.
There was just something about him, Angel thought unsteadily as another kind of thunder seemed to roll through her then, making her breath seem harder to catch than it should have been. She couldn’t seem to look away. Maybe it was his thick dark hair, too long to be strictly correct and at distinct and intriguing odds with the conservative suit he wore. Maybe it was the brooding, considering way he looked out over the ballroom, as if he saw nothing at all to catch his interest, nothing to combat whatever it was he carried inside
