Angel Of Darkness

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...

Daisy had come to her bedroom. Kelda had striven to explain the inexplicable but tears had overwhelmed her. ‘Just put it behind you, darling,’ her mother had whispered, in sympathetic tears herself. ‘I know you must feel very foolish but at your age one does do foolish things...that’s a fact of life...and it’s so hard to control your feelings but you’ll get over him...’

Her mother had assumed that she had thrown herself at Angelo’s head because she was infatuated with him, and Kelda had been too deeply ashamed of her behaviour and too desperately confused to protest. She hated Angelo and yet when he had touched her she had gone up in flames. It had not been the sort of self-discovery she could have shared with her mother.

Angelo had read her appearance by the side of his bed as a sexual invitation. Why he should have done so and why he should have acted on such an invitation, she had never understood. Angelo had never given her the remotest hint that he considered her even passably attractive. Could he really have mistaken her for another woman? She found that explanation unlikely. So why had he touched her? To humiliate...to hurt...and when had he planned to stop?

The next morning, Angelo had been gone. He had had an apartment in London. Her stepfather had heavily assured her that he attached absolutely no blame to her. She was innocent of all fault, he had stressed, making her feel guiltier than ever. She had felt so dreadful for causing a rift between father and son. When she had fought her embarrassment enough to mumble, ‘Angelo didn’t mean to—’ Tomaso had grimly silenced her with the reminder that Angelo was eight years older.

Her mother had said later, ‘I can’t reason with Tomaso. He’s very strict about some things and even though I assured him that it was only a few kisses, he won’t listen to me. He said that he can no longer trust Angelo with you and he’s very angry with him. I think he told Angelo to get out and that must have been devastating for both of them. Until now, they were so close...’

Angelo had accused her of setting him up. How, she had no idea, had never wanted to know, because frankly the way things had turned out afterwards she might as well have set him up. His father had told him to leave and she had been relieved of all responsibility for the episode. A couple of days later, she had travelled over to France with a girlfriend and her family for a month’s holiday and while she had been away she had received a letter from her mother, telling her that she was separating from Tomaso.

Had that been her fault? She was much inclined to say no. In the months coming up to that fatal night, she had noticed that Daisy was far from her sunny self. There had been something wrong in that relationship then, some tension that had had nothing to do with what had later happened between Angelo and her.

Dear lord, she suddenly reflected, why had her mother had to get involved with Tomaso Rossetti again? And the second she thought that, she despised herself. How could she be so selfish? Had Tim been right to suggest that her hostility towards the idea of Tomaso and Daisy remarrying related more to her own hatred of Angelo than to any genuine concern for her mother’s future happiness?

Mid-morning the next day, she received a call from Ella Donaldson, who ran the modelling agency she had been with since she was eighteen. ‘I’ve got a last-minute booking for you...if you’re not too proud to take it,’ she announced.

Kelda bit at her lower lip, gathering that the assignment was downmarket and less lucrative than what had once been offered to her.

Ella didn’t wait for her reply. ‘A holiday brochure. A very upmarket company, mind you...St Saviour Villas. Mr St Saviour himself strolled in here not half an hour ago and made a personal request for you, and let me remind you,’ Ella said drily, ‘right now, personal requests for you are like snow in high summer.’

‘I do appreciate that,’ Kelda put in tightly. Her interview with Ella Donaldson a month ago had been very unpleasant. A tough, astute businesswoman, Ella didn’t give two hoots about whether or not Danny Philips had been lying. Her sole angle had been Kelda’s stupidity in leaving herself open to such damaging publicity. The agency had lost a big commission when Kelda was dropped from the Fantasy campaign.

‘Good. Mr St Saviour thinks you’re a very classy looking lady...’ Ella told her. ‘But he did beat me down on your usual fee—’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone else must have dropped out last minute,’ Ella asserted. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t be wanting you airborne by tomorrow afternoon—’

Kelda frowned. ‘That soon?’

‘You’re free until Monday,’ Ella reminded her. ‘The shoot is in Italy...you should be home by Saturday. They’re using a photographer I’ve never heard of but you can’t afford to quibble. The other models are Italian.’

Kelda replaced the phone after Ella had finished advancing flight details. Italy...tomorrow. She’d have gone for the cost of the flight, she acknowledged inwardly, just to get away for a while. The next morning, she tried to phone her mother but Daisy was out. She called Tim at work instead and told him where she would be.

* * *

It was late when her flight landed at Pisa. Her name was called out over the public address system and she was greeted at the desk by a morose little man, who merely verified her identity and his own before sweeping up her case and leaving her to follow him out to the taxi.

Their destination was a villa complex in the La Magra Valley, somewhat off the tourist track as befitted an exclusive development. Kelda had never been to Tuscany before in the past, she had had assignments in both Rome and Milan but, tightly scheduled as her timetable had been then, she had never had the opportunity to explore. Her expressive mouth tightened ruefully. It was a little late to wish that she had taken more time off at the height of her popularity. Now she no longer had the luxury of choice. She would have to take any work that came her way just to survive.

It was too dark for her to appreciate the scenery and she rested back her head and dozed, waking up with a start when the door beside her opened and cooler air brushed her face.

Her driver, surely the most unusually silent Italian male she had ever met, already had her case unloaded. Climbing out, Kelda stared up at the dim outline of what looked like a medieval wall towering above them. A huge studded oak door was set into the wall. Kelda frowned. The door looked more like it belonged to a convent than a hotel. Her driver tugged the old-fashioned bell and headed back to his car.

An old woman appeared in the dark doorway.

‘Signorina Wyatt,’ Kelda introduced herself.

‘Sorda.’ The woman smiled and touched one ear and shrugged. Then she pointed to herself and said, ‘Stella.’

Did she mean that she was deaf? Grabbing her case up, Kelda followed her across a vast unlit courtyard. A huge building loomed on three sides. Her companion ushered her into a big tiled hall that looked mercifully more welcoming than what she had so far seen. No reception desk though...and it was so silent.

As she climbed a winding stone stair in the older woman’s wake, she smiled to herself. For sheer character, this place beat all the luxury hotels she had ever stayed in! As for the silence, this was not high season and they were off the beaten track. It was also pretty late and the other models were undoubtedly in bed, preparing themselves for the shoot at some ungodly hour of the morning.

Stella showed her into a panelled room of such impressive antiquity and grandeur that Kelda hesitated on the threshold. A giant four-poster bed, festooned with fringed damask hangings, dominated the room. A door in the panelling was spread wide to display a bathroom of reassuringly modern fixtures. French-style windows opened out on to a stone balcony, furnished with a lounger and several urns of blossoming flowers.

The bathroom was hung with fresh fleecy towels, furnished with soap and an array of toiletries such as were the norm in any top-flight hotel. The sight was indefinably reassuring. Kelda found herself looking for the list of rules that every hotel had somewhere and, while she was glancing behind the bathroom door, Stella disappeared.

With a rueful laugh, Kelda frowned at the closed bedroom door through which Stella had wafted herself at supersonic, silent speed, and then her attention fell on the tray of hot coffee and sandwiches sitting on a cabinet beside the bed.

She didn’t like to drink coffee last thing at night and she looked for a phone. There wasn’t one. She went to the door and then hung back. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to go demanding mineral water to drink at this hour if Stella was the only member of staff on duty.

Undressing, she treated herself to a quick shower to freshen up. With a sigh, she allowed herself one sandwich and two sips of coffee before climbing into the gloriously comfortable bed. She thought it funny that nobody from the crew had come to greet her, not even the photographer, keen to issue instructions for the shoot in the morning. Maybe a taste of fame had made her too self-important, she scolded herself. And she certainly couldn’t complain about the standard of accommodation allotted to her. Within minutes of switching out the light, she was fast asleep.

* * *

‘Buon giorno, signorina...’

‘Buon whatever,’ Kelda mumbled, stretching sleepily and opening her eyes as the curtains were pulled back, flooding the dark room with brilliant sunshine. As she sat up, she registered that the voice had been male and hurriedly hauled the sheet higher, thinking that if someone had to come into her room when she was asleep, she would have infinitely preferred a maid to a waiter.

‘Giorno,’ he sounded out with syllabic thoroughness.

And a blasted irritating waiter come to that, set on educating her, she thought grumpily or maybe what was really irritating her was the fact that the unfortunate man sounded horrendously like Angelo. One of those growlingly sexy accents all Italian males were probably born with. Like a cut-throat razor wrapped up in smooth black velvet, contriving to be both riveting and unnerving simultaneously.

She shaded her eyes to focus on the offender and nearly dropped the sheet. Her emerald-green eyes incandescent with disbelief, she gasped, ‘A-Angelo?’

CHAPTER THREE

‘WELCOME to my lair in Tuscany.’ Angelo uncoiled himself from his inexpressibly relaxed lounging stance against the French windows he had thrown wide and strolled to the foot of the bed.

Thinking she was in some impossibly realistic nightmare, Kelda didn’t bother about proudly holding her ground. She jack-knifed back against the carved wooden headboard and simply gaped at the virile vision of masculinity her crazy mind had conjured up out of thin air. He looked good even in a nightmare, but for some reason he was dressed for riding. Long black boots, thigh-hugging breeches of positively indecently faithful fit and a black cotton sweater that lent him a devilish aspect. He wasn’t real...he absolutely wasn’t real, and if she shut her eyes again he would go away. She did so.

‘Clearly you don’t quite function at the speed of light when you wake up alone,’ Angelo drawled in a tone that sent hideously responsive tremors down her rigid spine. ‘I can change that. And from where I’m standing I’m very well satisfied. You look really hot mistress material. I thought you might look a little worn at this hour without the cosmetic tricks of the trade, cara...’

Kelda’s long lashes swept up like fans. She swallowed hard.

Angelo was leaning in a very familiar way on the footboard, lustrous golden eyes wandering intently over every exposed inch of flesh above the sheet. ‘All those lovers...all those different beds,’ he extended. ‘I was expecting to be just a tiny bit disappointed... but I’m not. You look all dewy and untouched...Madre di Dio, how do you do it? Not, you’ll understand, that I am about to complain.’

Angelo...hot mistress material. Neither subject dovetailed. ‘What are you d-doing in my hotel room?’ she suddenly found the voice to demand explosively. ‘How did you know that I would be here?’

‘Ah, she speaks...shame,’ Angelo sighed with mock regret. ‘Now where do I start? This is not a hotel. It’s a private house. It belongs to me. I came upon it three years ago when I was investing in Max’s villa development. It was going to rack and ruin then but it was so totally private, I had to have it—’

‘Your house?’ Kelda repeated incredulously. ‘This is your house? What the hell am I staying here for?’

‘I brought you here,’ Angelo said softly. ‘It was astonishingly easy. Max St Saviour is a business acquaintance. He’s very happily married and prone to romantic delusions. I had no problem persuading him to approach the Donaldson Agency on my behalf. He thought he was playing Cupid. Did you like the touch about the reduced fee? Now Max didn’t like that bit but I felt it added a dash of authenticity...’

A slow, deep flush of almost uncontrollable rage was reddening Kelda’s complexion. She couldn’t even begin to believe what she was hearing, but there was something frighteningly sincere about the hard dark onslaught of Angelo’s gaze. ‘Are you telling me that there is no assignment...I don’t believe you!’ she snapped.

‘Max couldn’t afford you,’ Angelo said with dulcet emphasis. ‘But I can, and I don’t need to know one end of a camera from another to know exactly what to do with you.’

Kelda’s head was swimming with a mess of utterly bewildered thoughts. There was no assignment? Then why bring her here? Why would Angelo lure her to Tuscany? Why was Angelo surveying her as if she was a cream cake and he was starving for a bite to eat? Angelo had never looked at her like that before...and all the double entendres...what on earth was going on? Had Angelo gone insane? This was not Angelo as she knew him. This was another Angelo entirely.

‘You really are the most spectacularly beautiful creature,’ Angelo murmured in a thickened undertone. ‘And if you stay in that bed much longer, I’m likely to join you.’

Kelda wrenched the sheet so high it came adrift from the foot of the mattress and exposed her bare feet, but she didn’t notice. She couldn’t take her eyes off Angelo’s darkly handsome features. ‘W-what are you talking about?’ she demanded in a near shriek. ‘Have you gone crazy?’

Angelo winced at the ear-splitting decibels. ‘I wish I had volume control on your voice.’

‘Y-you brought me here...all the way to Italy for an assignment that doesn’t exist,’ she recounted, spitting out each work with clarity. ‘What I want to know is why?’

‘I have this feeling that our mutual parents will get on much more happily with you out of the way,’ Angelo drawled. ‘I could quite happily have knocked you on the head and dragged you out of your apartment by the hair forty-eight hours ago. But that would have been foolish. And, cara, I am very rarely foolish—’

‘You are right out of your tiny mind!’ she launched at him in seething bewilderment.

‘No. If you had simply disappeared, questions would have been asked,’ he pointed out speciously. ‘This way you’re here on a perfectly respectable alibi—’

‘But I won’t be here for long! And you’re going to pay for this!’ Kelda spat.

‘I have your passport, your money and your credit cards...not much use, those, are they?’ Angelo remarked silkily. ‘You’re right up to your limit on all of them.’

‘You have my passport...how do you know I’m up to my limit?’ she suddenly heard herself demanding.

‘I am completely conversant with your financial status,’ Angelo admitted unashamedly. ‘And I have to say, in my capacity as a banker, how did you get yourself in such a mess? You are in debt to the tune of thousands!’

Abruptly she turned her head away, utterly humiliated that Angelo of all people should know such things. She had been foolish with her money when she’d first started earning. But when Daisy had divorced Tomaso and had, inconceivably, refused to accept any alimony from him, Kelda had been determined to buy her mother a decent home to live in again.

She had bought Daisy a lovely little cottage not too far from London. It had not come cheap. She had sent her mother off on holiday several times. She had settled her brother’s debts times without number, bought expensive presents for her family and friends. Her apartment had been the only major item she had ever bought for herself. It had never occurred to her that the gravy-train of her high income could come to a sudden frightening halt. But it had and she just hadn’t been prepared for it.

‘You really do need a rich patron, who can settle your debts and pick up the tab for your expensive tastes...someone who would never question the bills,’ Angelo murmured with the soft, smooth delivery of a devil’s advocate. ‘I’m very generous with my lovers...I’ve never had a mistress before...you see, strange as it may seem to you cara...I’ve never had to buy a woman before. But the more I look at you in that bed and contemplate total possession and title, the more I see your investment potential...’