Flora's Defiance

When the talking was over, Flora accepted a lift with Willem’s aunt and uncle to Angelo’s home. He lived in an imposing historic building, a literal mansion, which Julie had once described to Flora in the most fulsome of terms as a ‘palace’. The house, which had belonged to several generations of van Zaals, was very traditional inside and out, featuring high ceilings, polished wooden floors, gleaming antique furniture and walls covered with huge splendid paintings. Coffee was served in the very elegant drawing room by the plump, smiling housekeeper whom Angelo addressed as Therese.

Under cover of a conversation with a business colleague, Angelo found himself discreetly watching Flora, noting her every tiny move and change of expression and the faint silvery sheen of tears still marking her cheeks. Even at a glance he could see that she seethed with emotion, messy dangerous stuff that it was, he acknowledged grimly, for she was the sort of woman he had always avoided getting involved with. More than a year had passed since their last meeting. He approved of the fact that her hair was no longer short and he could not resist picturing those luxuriant coppery tresses freed from the restraint of their ribbon. And trailing across a pillow? a sarcastic little inner voice enquired. As irritation with his male predictability gripped Angelo, there was a tightening heaviness at his groin, his libido reacting all too enthusiastically to Flora Bennett’s presence and the allure of an erotic fantasy.

He sensed the passion in her and it drew him like the sun on a cold wintry day. Brilliant eyes cloaked, he studied her fixedly and, just as he had from their very first encounter, fought the magnetic pull of her with all his considerable force of will. Control and lucidity were everything to Angelo, who demanded more of himself than he ever had from anyone else. After all, nobody knew better than Angelo that an affair with the wrong woman could lead to disaster and it was the one risk he would not take.

Flora dragged her attention from a superb painting of an ancestral family group, striving not to seek Angelo’s resemblance to some of its members with his clear good-looking features, though he would be like a sleek dark avenging angel set amongst those fair rosy-cheeked faces, she thought absently. She turned round to see where he was and collided headlong with his burning appraisal. An arrow of pure burning heat slivered through her slim length, kicking every nerve-ending into almost painful sensitivity. Her full lips pressed together tightly as she walked towards him, suppressing her responses with furious resolve.

Angelo inclined his handsome dark head to his housekeeper and summoned her to his side. ‘Therese will take you upstairs now to see Mariska.’

Flora was introduced to the pretty dark-haired nanny, Anke, but she really only had eyes for her niece, who sat in a child seat playing with a selection of toys. With her slightly turned-up nose and dimples, blue eyes and golden hair, the little girl bore a startling likeness to Julie. Flora’s eyes stung and she got down on her knees beside the chair to get reacquainted with her niece, once again deeply regretting the truth that she was almost a stranger to Mariska.

Mariska studied Flora with big blue eyes and laughed when her aunt tickled her chubby little hand. A cheerful, affectionate child, she played happily with Flora and she was the perfect comfort for her aunt after the highly stressful week she had endured. When the little girl became sleepy, Flora checked her watch and was surprised by how much time she had spent with her niece, for the afternoon was over. Descending the stairs, she saw Angelo in the hall below. He was so tall and dark and his glossy black cropped hair shone beneath the lights. He had the bronzed profile of a Greek god and the body of one as well, her rebellious thoughts added defiantly.

‘I wondered if it would be possible for me to visit the houseboat where Willem and Julie lived tomorrow afternoon,’ she asked tautly.

‘Yes. A cleaning crew is currently sorting the vessel out for a handover back to the landlord,’ Angelo revealed. ‘There may be some of your sister’s things which you wish to take home with you.’

There was a thickness in Flora’s throat. Julie had always travelled light so she doubted that there would be many keepsakes. She forced a rather watery smile and took her leave to walk out into the cool evening air.

Watching her departure from the window, Angelo had the cold comfort of knowing that he was behaving badly. Flora was on her own in a foreign city and she had just buried her sister and her brother-in-law. Yet he was leaving her to return to an anonymous hotel for the evening. His handsome mouth clenched hard. Even as he watched her he noticed the enticing feminine sway of her hips in the dark suit she wore, the pouting curve of her bottom that stretched the skirt’s fabric and the shapely turn of her calves and narrow ankles. She had terrific legs. He imagined inching up that skirt and as his body reacted with full blown arousal he released his breath in a sudden sharp hiss. He knew that he could not trust himself if he offered dinner and so left it at that.

Exhaustion engulfed Flora by the time she reached her room as she had barely slept since receiving the news of the double tragedy. She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, where she fell asleep almost instantly. The chirrup of the phone by the bed wakened her. ‘Hello?’ she mumbled drowsily.

‘It’s Angelo.’ It was an unnecessary announcement because Flora knew only one male possessed of a dark deep drawl as rich and potentially sinful as chocolate melting on her taste buds. ‘Have you dined yet? ‘

Flora froze in surprise and wondered if he could hear the sound of her jaw dropping in shock. ‘Er …’

‘If you haven’t I would be happy to take you out to eat this evening,’ Angelo murmured, smooth as silk.

His voice actually set up a chain-reaction quiver down her taut spine and she sat up with a start. She could not credit the invitation and it unnerved her. ‘Thanks, but I’ve already eaten,’ she lied without hesitation. ‘But it was kind of you to offer.’

‘I wasn’t being kind,’ Angelo countered, a rougher edge filtering through his unforgettable drawl.

‘Oh …’ Dry-mouthed and flushed, Flora could not think of a single thing to say and he filled in the silence with complete cool and bid her goodnight. He didn’t like her, she knew he didn’t like her, for the cool censure when he looked at her with those amazing eyes of his was unmistakeable, even if she didn’t know what she had done to deserve that attitude. So why on earth had he suddenly decided to invite her out to dinner? Had he felt sorry for her? The very suspicion made Flora bridle because she had never sought out any man for comfort.

She ordered a snack from Room Service and then went for a quick shower. She ate perched cross-legged on the bed with a book propped open and just knew that Angelo would disapprove. But she had said no and she should be proud of herself, although if she was honest panic and surprise had together combined to ensure her negative response. In addition she had nothing to wear but the suit she had worn to the funeral, since she had only packed casual jeans and a top for her short stay. She could not even imagine dining out in some fancy restaurant in Angelo’s company. On her final visit to Charlbury St Helens, Julie had shown her sister a magazine article featuring a couple of Angelo’s lady friends, beautiful women dressed in cutting-edge fashion, who could match his sophistication and cool.

Regardless of those reflections, Flora could not help wondering what it would have been like to be the sole focus of Angelo’s attention for a couple of hours. Heat bubbled like excitement low in her pelvis and she tensed and suppressed that disturbing line of thought. It was a very long time before she contrived to drift off to sleep again that night …

CHAPTER TWO

THE following day, Angelo was in a business meeting in Rotterdam. But for all the attention he was giving to the exchange of views, he might as well have stayed at home. He was proud of his cool logic and intelligence and could not understand why both had proved insufficient to forecast Flora Bennett’s most recent move. The dinner invitation had offered him a valid way of bringing Flora up to speed on events in her late sister’s life before she got the bad news from the professionals she was consulting that very morning. It would have been tasteless for him to pass on that information at the funeral. But she had, most unexpectedly, turned him down.

Handsome mouth tightening and quite unaware of the attention his unusually long silence was attracting, Angelo shrugged a broad shoulder sheathed in the finest silk and wool mix. He was willing to admit that he had no prior experience of hearing the word ‘no’ from a woman’s lips. It was a fact that the females he met fell over themselves to say yes. Yes to every invite, yes to sex, yes to just about any damned thing he wanted. Women in Angelo’s world were very predictable and he had never had the smallest urge, he told himself fiercely, to walk on the wilder side of life. He had never forgotten the years of misery that had resulted from his late father’s desire to do exactly that with Willem’s mother, a beautiful volatile widow.

But would Flora have slept with him last night? That question came out of nowhere at him before he was even aware of having thought about such a possibility. He was impervious to the covert looks he was receiving as his brilliant blue eyes became even more abstracted. He wanted her. He was even willing to admit that there was just something about Flora Bennett that grabbed him every time he saw her. Yet last night his intentions had been pure.

Of course it was entirely possible that Flora Bennett knew a great deal more about Willem and Julie’s lifestyle than he had had cause to suspect. His lean strong features darkened at that idea. Flora had seen little of her sister since her wedding to Willem, but she could well have decided to give Julie and her problems a wide berth. Angelo had never had that option because the overwhelming need to protect Mariska from her parents’ folly had repeatedly forced him to intervene. Unfortunately taking care of Mariska’s needs would entail building some kind of an ongoing connection with the other side of her family. He might distrust Mariska’s aunt but she was still the only blood relative the little girl had left alive. He could not ignore that bond or the fact that Flora had spent over two hours happily entertaining her niece and had inspired her nanny to remark that Mariska’s English aunt was wonderfully natural with children.

How much weight would the professionals put on that bond or on so admirably maternal a demonstration? Was he prepared to get married just to improve his own claim to the little girl? Angelo shifted uneasily in his seat. The prospect of only sleeping with one woman for the rest of his life appealed to him as much as a dose of poison. Of course he could make marriage more of a business arrangement and retain a certain amount of freedom, he reasoned bleakly. Many women would accept such conditions simply to become a van Zaal with access to a fleet of private jets, a luxurious array of international homes and a huge allowance to spend on designer clothes and jewellery. Angelo had learned very young that it was possible to buy virtually anything he wanted and he was prepared to pay handsomely over the odds to acquire the perfect wife.

A perfect wife who would naturally be blonde, educated, classy and from the Netherlands. Dutch women were wonderfully practical and resilient, he thought appreciatively. He needed a sensible woman from a respectable background who would accept his challenging work schedule without complaint and who would embellish his social and domestic life while still essentially allowing him his privacy. A woman content to enjoy the lifestyle he could give her and make no further demands of him. He decided that as long as the controversial subjects of fidelity or romance were kept off the menu he could face the prospect of marriage for Mariska’s sake. He had become very fond of the little girl.

Emerging from that lengthy and very sobering thought process, Angelo checked his watch and made one of the lightning-fast decisions that he was famous for. After a working lunch to make up for his non-participation in the meeting, he would meet Flora Bennett at the houseboat and tie up the loose ends between them before she left Amsterdam and returned to England. It was the rational thing to do and he was not being influenced by his attraction to her, he assured himself with considerable satisfaction. He was far too level-headed to stray into such hazardous territory with a woman of dubious morals.

Around the same time as Angelo was travelling from his head office in Rotterdam back to Amsterdam, Flora was literally reeling out of the public building where she had met with Mariska’s social work team: she was in deep shock from what she had learned during that encounter.

Shock that she’d had not the slightest idea of what really had gone on in Willem and Julie’s lives, shock that Julie had managed to convince her during their weekly phone calls that they were leading a perfectly ordinary life when, in fact, the very opposite was true. Indeed, both Willem and her sister had resorted to petty crime in an effort to satisfy their addiction to drugs. Her half-sister and her husband had been thieves and drug addicts. Hopelessly addicted, so that despite all pleas and offers of counselling that had been offered to them they had continued on their dogged path to self-destruction. Indeed Willem and Julie had been high when Willem had crashed their car and then he and his wife had died. Flora remained amazed by the stroke of fate that had kept Mariska alive.

Although every attempt had been made to shield Angelo’s privacy it had slowly become abundantly clear to Flora that Willem’s stepbrother had been heavily involved from the outset in all attempts to persuade the young couple to enter a rehabilitation programme. He had also done everything that he could to protect his stepbrother’s child from harm.

In recent months, Mariska had virtually never been left to rely on parental care alone. Either she had been in day care or in her nanny’s care, and when Willem and Julie had partied and Anke had deemed her charge to be at risk she had taken Mariska to Angelo’s home. Yet, even with all those safeguards in place, Flora’s niece could still easily have been killed along with her parents when Julie had chosen to take her daughter out of day care early one afternoon without telling anyone and had got into Willem’s car with her. Mariska’s very survival was a small miracle.

A stiff late spring breeze gusted down the street of tall, narrow and highly ornamental buildings that bordered the canal Flora was walking alongside and her tears chilled on her cheeks. She stepped hurriedly out of the way of a cyclist riding past and sucked in a steadying breath while she paused to consult the map she had bought to help her negotiate the maze of streets.

It was an effort to think straight while she was being eaten alive by a great burst of angry resentment and regret. But her half-sister was gone and nothing could bring Julie back. Yet on whose say-so had Flora been excluded from knowing about and trying to help the young couple? Flora had a very strong suspicion about the identity of that culprit. While the social workers had been bound by rules of confidentiality, only Angelo van Zaal would have dared to leave Julie’s one close relative in ignorance of her plight.

When she’d first moved to Amsterdam, Julie had sent her sister loads of photos, so now Flora had little difficulty picking out the bright blue-and-white-painted houseboat from the others moored on a quiet stretch of water overlooked by a picturesque terrace of gabled houses. After all, she had a framed sunlit picture of that same evocative scene sitting in her home. She stepped onto the deck and as she did so the door of the cabin opened, framing the tall black-haired male whose inexcusable silence over the past year had stoked her umbrage.

For an instant, Flora froze, her wide green eyes locking onto Angelo van Zaal. He looked strikingly elegant if out of place in his formality in a dark grey business suit and silk tie. The suit had the exclusive fit of a tailored designer garment, framing wide strong masculine shoulders and hugging lean hips and long muscular thighs. As he stepped outside the breeze ruffled his luxuriant black hair above his lean, darkly handsome features. The sheer impact of his physical charisma hit her like a sudden blow to the head, leaving her dizzy. She collided with sapphire-blue eyes and her tummy shimmied like a jelly while her breath feathered in her throat.

‘What on earth are you doing here? ‘ she demanded tautly.

‘This seemed to be an opportune time and place to talk to you.’

‘It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it? ‘ Green eyes flashing as emerald as jewels in sunlight, Flora stalked past his tall still figure into the saloon of the houseboat. The spacious interior had a bare look, for all the surfaces were clear and a stack of cardboard boxes spread out from one corner. ‘In fact I would say that talk of any kind between us now would be a waste of your valuable time.’

Unaccustomed to such a bold unapologetic attack, and with his handsome mouth in a sardonic line, Angelo studied her. Colourful copper-coloured hair falling in a lavish windblown cloud round her shoulders, Flora wore a short black trench coat, jeans and a green sweater, and even in that casual garb she looked amazing, he acknowledged with distinct reluctance. She had the transparent alabaster skin of the true redhead and soft pink self-conscious colour defined her cheekbones while he studied her, quietly marvelling at the amount of emotion she contrived to emanate even when she was silent. Trembling with the force of her fury, Flora undid her coat, dropped it down on a seat and spun back to face him.

‘How could you not tell me what was going on here?’ she demanded in ringing reproach. ‘Willem and Julie were my family as well. At the very least I had a right to know that Julie was taking drugs!’

‘She was an adult of twenty-one, Flora. She made her own choice, which was that under no circumstances were you to be told about their problems.’

Flora lifted her chin in challenge. ‘Meaning?’

‘Exactly what I said. I did speak to her and I know for a fact that her social worker urged her to confide in you, but your sister didn’t want you to know that she had got caught up in drugs and I was not in a position to go against her wishes.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ Flora dealt him a furious unimpressed look, convinced that he was simply trying to palm her off with excuses. ‘You always do as you like, Angelo. You’re a strong man. You’re no one’s whipping boy!’

‘Believe me when I tell you that it was a huge struggle to keep the communication lines between me and Willem and Julie open. Their lifestyle was abhorrent to me but for their daughter’s sake it was imperative that I still retained access to them,’ Angelo retorted grimly. ‘Had I gone against your sister’s wishes they would no longer have trusted me and Mariska would have suffered …’

‘So you got involved and I was left on the outside, kept in ignorance of what was happening in Willem and Julie’s lives until it was too late,’ Flora condemned with unconcealed bitterness.

‘I made Mariska’s needs my priority,’ Angelo countered without apology. ‘I did the best I could in a very difficult situation.’

‘Well, the best you could wasn’t good enough, was it? ‘ Flora threw at him fierily, her temper rising again like steam inside a kettle as the sheer awfulness of what she had learned that morning bit into her like painful claws on tender flesh. ‘Less than a year after Mariska’s birth, your stepbrother and my sister are both dead and their child is an orphan!’

His superb bone structure rigid, Angelo surveyed her with cool ice-blue, astonishingly clear eyes set above the smooth olive planes of his handsome face. His eyes had the shockingly vivid clarity of a glacier lake she had once seen in the Alps, she thought absently. It struck her that so far nothing she had said had moved him in the slightest and his rigorous self-control seemed to mock her emotional state.

‘Willem and Julie were a fatal combination,’ Angelo murmured in a tone of flat finality. ‘Willem was weak and troubled, and before they even met Julie was a habitual drug user.’

As the ramifications of that accusation sank in, shocking Flora all over again, she released a jagged laugh of disbelief. ‘How dare you try to blame Julie for what happened to them? How dare you insinuate that she was the prime instigator?’

‘I am telling you what I know to be the truth. I have no desire to malign your memory of your sister.’

Flora shot him an enraged glance, green eyes luminous as green glass on the seashore. ‘Then don’t do it.’

‘I did not hurl the first stone,’ Angelo countered levelly, his attention wandering to the way the fine wool sweater lovingly moulded the small pouting curves of her breasts and defined the slight bump of her prominent nipples. He suspected that she wasn’t wearing a bra and the full taut sensation of heaviness at his groin increased as he imagined peeling off that sweater. It took enormous self-discipline to wrench his mind back from that erotic reverie and her ability to distract him without even trying to do so infuriated him.

‘You could have told me that Willem and Julie had got involved in drugs! ‘ Flora slung at him in a seething undertone, her eyes bright with antagonism and accusation. The growing tension in the atmosphere only put her more on edge. ‘And you could have told me that I had to conceal where I got that information from.’

‘As I’ve already said, when I was unable to persuade either Willem or his wife to stop using drugs or even to enter counselling, my main goal was to protect Mariska from their excesses.’

Flora snatched in an audible breath in an effort to calm her teeming emotions down to a more controllable level. She folded her arms tightly and crossed the floor, her slender spine stiff as a pencil. The dreadful compulsion to stare at him had her in its hold, though, for when she looked once she always had to look back at him again and admire his amazing bone structure, dazzling eyes and tall, powerful physique. That he could stun her even in the midst of a bitter argument outraged her sense of what was decent. In measured rejection she fixed her eyes on the view of the quiet canal beyond the window. ‘It’s so unfair that you’re trying to foist the blame on Julie.’

‘I am not trying to do that,’ Angelo rebutted, his attention jerking away from the snug fit of her jeans over her heart-shaped derrière, for his imagination had really not required that added stimulus in her radius. His susceptibility to her every move around him galled him and gave him a disturbingly unfamiliar sense of being out of control. ‘But I must be honest with you, even if you find that honesty offensive.’

‘It is deeply offensive that you should accuse my sister of having been an habitual substance abuser,’ Flora pointed out thinly, turning back to him for emphasis while her tongue slid out to moisten the dry curve of her lower lip.

‘Even if I know that to be true?’ Instantly engaged in picturing the effect of that small pink tongue tip on a highly sensitive part of his own anatomy, Angelo surveyed the sultry raspberry-tinted fullness of her mouth with driven concentration. She was making him feel ridiculously like a sex-starved adolescent boy and his hands clenched into defensive fists by his side.

‘How could you possibly know such a thing to be true?’ Flora flung in angry, scornful dismissal of that claim. She clashed head-on with his electrifyingly blue eyes, which might as well have been lit by tiny blue flames for she had the sensation of heat dancing over her entire skin surface. She flushed and her nipples tingled almost painfully while a scratchy sensation of warmth and awareness settled between her legs. In an uneasy movement, she shifted position off one foot on to the other.