The Secret Valtinos Baby

‘But it bothers me that I hate him so much,’ Merry confided in a rush half under her breath. ‘I’ve never been a hater before.’

‘You’re still hurting. Now that you’re starting to date again, those bad memories will soon sink into the past.’

An unexpected smile lit Merry’s heart-shaped face at the prospect of the afternoon out she was having the following day. As a veterinary surgeon, Fergus Wickham made regular visits to the rescue centre. He had first met Merry when she was offputtingly pregnant, only evidently it had not put him off, it had merely made him bide his time until her daughter was born and she was more likely to be receptive to an approach.

She liked Fergus, she enjoyed his company, she reminded herself doggedly. He didn’t give her butterflies in her tummy, though, or make her long for his mouth, she conceded guiltily, but then how important were such physical feelings in the overall scheme of things? Angel’s sexual allure had been the health equivalent of a lethal snakebite, pulling her in only to poison her. Beautiful but deadly. Dear heaven, she hated him, she acknowledged, rigid with the seething trapped emotion that sent her memory flying inexorably back sixteen months...

CHAPTER TWO

MERRY WAS FULL of enthusiasm when she started her first job even though it wasn’t her dream job by any stretch of the imagination. Having left university with a first-class honours degree in accountancy and business, she had no intention of settling permanently into being a front-desk receptionist at Valtinos Enterprises.

Even so, she had badly needed paid employment and the long recruitment process involved in graduate job applications had ensured that she was forced to depend on Sybil’s generosity for more months than she cared to count. Sybil had already supported Merry through her years as a student, helping her out with handy vacation jobs at the rescue centre while always providing her with a comfortable home to come back to for weekends and holidays.

Her job at Valtinos Enterprises was Merry’s first step towards true independence. The work paid well and gave her the breathing space in which to look for a more suitable position, while also enabling her to base herself in London without relying on her aunt’s financial help. She had moved into a room in a grotty apartment and started work at VE with such high hopes.

And on her first day Angel strode out of the lift and her breath shorted out in her chest as though she had been punched. He had luxuriant black curls that always looked messy and that lean, darkly beautiful face of his had been crafted by a creative genius with exotic high cheekbones, a narrow, straight nose and eyes the colour of liquid honey. Eyes that she had only very much later discovered could turn as hard and cutting as black diamonds.

‘You’re new,’ he commented, treating her to the kind of lingering appraisal that made her feel hot all over.

‘This is my first day, Mr Valtinos,’ she confided.

‘Don’t waste your smiles there,’ her co-worker on the desk whispered snidely as Angel walked into his office. ‘He doesn’t flirt with employees. In fact the word is that he’s fired a couple of his PAs for getting too personal with him.’

‘I’m not interested,’ Merry countered with amusement, and indeed when it came to men she rarely was.

Growing up watching her mother continually search for the man of her dreams while ignoring everything else life had to offer had scared Merry. Having survived her unsettled childhood, she set a high value on security and she was keen to establish her own accountancy firm. She didn’t take risks...ever. In fact she was the most risk-averse person she had ever met.

That innate caution had kept her working so hard at university that she had taken little part in the social whirl. There had been occasional boyfriends but none she had cared to invite into her bed. Not only had she never felt passion, but she had also never suffered from her mother’s blazing infatuations. Watching relationships around her take off and then fail in an invariably nasty ending that smashed friendships and caused pain and resentment had turned Merry off even more. She liked a calm, tidy life, a quiet life, which in no way explained how she could ever have become intimate with a male as volatile as Angel, she acknowledged with lingering bewilderment.

But it was the truth, the absolute truth, that on paper she and Angel were a horrendous match. Angel was off-the-charts volatile with a volcanic hot temper that erupted every time someone did or said something he considered stupid. He wasn’t tolerant or easy to deal with. In the first weeks of her employment she regularly saw members of his personal staff race out of his office as though they had wings on their feet, their pale faces stamped with stress and trepidation. He was very impatient and equally demanding. He might resemble a supermodel in his fabulously sophisticated designer suits, but he had the temperament of a tyrant and an overachiever’s appetite for work and success. The only thing she admired about him in those initial weeks was his cleverness.

Serving coffee in the boardroom, she heard him dissect entire arguments with a handful of well-chosen words. She noticed that people listened when he spoke and admired his intellect while competing to please and impress him. Occasionally beautiful shapely blondes would drift in to meet him for lunch, women of a definite type, the artificial socialite type, seemingly chosen only for their enviable faces and figures and their ability to look at him with stunned appreciation. Those who arrived without an invite didn’t even get across the threshold of his office. He treated women like casual amusements and discarded them as soon as he got bored, and the procession of constantly changing faces made it obvious that he got bored very quickly and easily.

In short, nothing about Angel Valtinos should have attracted Merry. He shamelessly flaunted almost every flaw she disliked in a man. He was a selfish, hubristic, oversexed workaholic, spoiled by a life of luxury and the target of more admiration and attention than was good for him.

But even after six weeks in his radius, dredging her eyes off Angel when he was within view had proved impossible. He commanded a room simply by walking into it. Even his voice was dark, deep and smoulderingly charismatic. Once a woman heard that slumberous accented drawl she just had to turn her head and look. His dynamic personality suffused his London headquarters like an energy bolt while his mercurial moods kept his employees on edge and eager to please. Valtinos Enterprises felt dead and flat when he was abroad.

When one of Angel’s personal assistants left and the position was offered internally, Merry applied, keen to climb the ladder. Angel summoned her to his office to study her with frowning dark golden eyes. ‘Why is a candidate with your skills working on Reception?’ he demanded impatiently.

‘It was the first job I was offered,’ Merry admitted, brushing her damp palms down over her skirt. ‘I was planning to move on.’

Rising to his feet, making her uneasily aware of his height, he extended a slim file. ‘Find somewhere quiet to work. You’re off Reception for the morning. Check out this business and provide me with an accurate assessment of its financial history and current performance. If you do it well, I’ll interview you this afternoon.’

That afternoon, he settled the file back on the desk and surveyed her, his wide, sensual mouth compressing. ‘You did very well but you’re a little too cautious in your forecasts. I enjoy risk,’ he imparted, watching with amusement as she frowned in surprise at that admission. ‘You’ve got the job. I hope you can take the heat. Not everyone can.’

‘If you shout at me, I’ll probably shout back,’ Merry warned him warily.

And an appreciative grin slashed his shapely lips, making him so powerfully attractive that for a split second she simply stared, unable to look away. ‘You may just work out very well.’

So began the most exciting phase of Merry’s working life. Merry was the most junior member of Angel’s personal staff but the one he always entrusted with figures. Sybil was thrilled by the promotion her niece had won but would have been horrified by the long hours Merry worked and the amount of responsibility she carried.

‘The boss has got the hots for you,’ one of her male co-workers told her with amusement when she had been two months in the job. ‘Obviously you have something all those long tall blondes he parades through here don’t, because he’s always watching you.’

‘I haven’t noticed anything,’ she said firmly, reluctant to let that kind of comment go unchallenged.

But even as she spoke she knew she was very carefully impersonal and unobtrusive in Angel’s vicinity because she was conscious of him in a way she had not been conscious of a man before. If she was foolish enough to risk a head-on collision with his spectacular liquid honey eyes, her tummy somersaulted, her mouth dried and she couldn’t catch her breath. Feeling like that mortified her. She knew it was attraction and she didn’t like it, not only because he was her boss, but also because it made her feel out of control.

And then fate took a hand when Merry firmly believed that neither of them would ever have made any sort of a move. A highly contagious flu virus had decimated the staff and as his employees fell by the wayside Merry found herself increasingly exposed to working alone with Angel. At the office late one evening, he offered her a drink and a ride home. She said no thanks to the drink, deeming it unwise, and yes to the ride because it would get her home faster.

In the lift on the way down to the underground car park, Angel studied her with smouldering dark golden eyes. She felt dizzy and hot, as if her clothes were shrink-wrapped to her skin, preventing her from normal breathing. He lifted a long-fingered brown hand and traced his fingertips along the full curve of her lower lip in a caress that left her trembling, and then, as though some invisible line of restraint had snapped inside him, he crushed her back against the mirrored wall and kissed her, hungrily, feverishly, wildly with the kind of passion she was defenceless against.

‘Come home with me,’ he urged in a raw undertone as she struggled to pull herself back together while the lift doors stood open beside them.

Her flushed face froze. ‘Absolutely not. We made a mistake. Let’s forget about it.’

‘That’s not always possible,’ Angel breathed thickly. ‘I’ve been trying to forget about the way you make me feel for weeks.’

Disconcerted by that blunt admission as he stepped out of the lift, Merry muttered dismissively, ‘That’s just sex. Ignore it.’

Angel stared back at her in wonderment. ‘Ignore it?’

As the lift doors began to close with her still inside it, he reached in and held them open. ‘Come on.’

‘I’ll get the Tube as usual.’

‘Don’t be childish,’ Angel ground out. ‘I am fully in control.’

Merry wasn’t convinced, remembering that mad, exciting grab and the slam of her body back against the lift wall, but that instant of hesitation was her undoing because without hesitation Angel closed a hand over hers and pulled her out of the lift. ‘I’ll drop you home.’

‘There are boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed,’ she told him with precision on the way to his car.

‘Don’t preach at me,’ Angel sliced back in a driven undertone. ‘I don’t have a history of making moves on my staff. You are a one-off.’

‘And it won’t happen again now that we’re both on our guard so let’s forget about it,’ Merry counselled, sliding breathlessly into a long silver low-slung bullet of a vehicle that she suspected was worth many times more than her annual salary. ‘I prevented you from making a mistake.’

‘You’re preaching again,’ Angel derided. ‘If I hadn’t stopped kissing you we’d still be in the lift!’

‘No. I would’ve pushed you away,’ she insisted with cool assurance.

She gave him her address, although he didn’t seem to need it, and the journey through heavy traffic was silent, tense and unnerving. He pulled up at the kerb outside the ugly building where she lived. ‘You could afford to live in a better area than this,’ he censured.

‘I have a healthy savings account,’ she told him with pride, releasing her seat belt at the same time as he reached for her again.

His wide sensual mouth crushed hers with burning hunger and no small amount of frustration. Her whole body leapt as though he had punched a button detonating something deep down inside her, releasing a hot surge of tingling awareness in her pelvis that made her hips squirm and her nipples pinch painfully tight.

Angel lifted his tousled dark head. ‘I’m still waiting on you pushing me away. You’re all talk and no action,’ he condemned.

‘I don’t think you’d appreciate a slap,’ Merry framed frigidly, her face burning with mortification.

‘If it meant that you ditched the icy control I’d be begging for it,’ Angel husked suggestively, soft and low, the growl of his accent shaking her up.

Merry launched out of his sports car as though jet-propelled, uncharacteristically flustered and shaken that she had failed to live up to her own very high principles on acceptable behaviour. She should’ve pushed him away, slapped him, thumped him if necessary to drive her message home. Nothing less would cool his heels. He was a highly competitive, aggressive male, who viewed defeat as an ongoing challenge.

His car stayed at the kerb until she stalked into the building and only then did she breathe again, filling her compressed lungs and shivering as though she had stepped out of a freezing snowstorm. She felt all shaken up, shaken up and stirred in a way she didn’t appreciate and almost hated him for.

The feel of his mouth on hers, the taste of it, the explosive charge of heat hurtling at breakneck speed down into her belly and spreading to other, more intimate places she never ever thought about. How dared he do that to her? She would lodge a complaint of sexual harassment! Didn’t he know what he was risking? But being Angel, he wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even stop to consider that he was playing with fire. Indeed, the knowledge would only energise and stimulate him because he loved to push the limits.

She curled up tight in her bed that night, overwhelmed by her first real experience of sexual temptation. When he kissed her she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. A kiss had never had that effect on her before and she was unnerved by the discovery that a kiss could be that influential. She toyed with the idea of complaining about sexual harassment, pictured Angel laughing fearlessly in the face of such a threat and finally decided that she didn’t want the embarrassment of that on her employment record. Particularly when such a claim would fail because she hadn’t pushed him away, hadn’t given him an immediate rejection.

The next day she was very nervous going into work, but Angel didn’t do or say anything that was different and she was strangely irritated by that reality: that he could act as though he had never offered to take her home to bed for the night and, afterwards, simply treat her like everyone else. But those same moments of intimacy had carried a higher price for her. It was as though he had stripped away her tough outer layer and chipped her out of her cautious shell to ensure that she began feeling physical and emotional responses she had comfortably held at bay until she’d met him.

During the week that followed she was feverishly aware of Angel to a degree that sent her temperature rocketing. When he looked at her, it was as if a blast of concentrated heat lit her up inside and her bra would feel scratchy against her tender nipples and a dull ache would stir between her thighs, her every tiny reaction in his presence like a slap in the face that shamed her. It was a terrible destructive wanting that wouldn’t go away. He had lit the spark and she seemed stuck with the spread of the fire licking away at her nerves and her fierce pride.

At the end of that week, Angel asked her to stay behind after everyone else had left to go for drinks.

‘Next on the agenda...us,’ Angel murmured sibilantly.

Merry shot him a withering appraisal. ‘There is no us.’

‘Exactly,’ Angel pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Scratch the itch and it goes away and dies, ignore it and it festers.’

‘Your seduction vocabulary needs attention,’ Merry quipped, standing straight in front of him, grudging amusement dancing in her crystalline eyes.

Angel grimaced. ‘I don’t do seduction.’

‘I don’t do one-night stands.’

‘So if I make it dinner and sex I’m in with a chance?’ A sardonic ebony brow elevated.

‘No chance whatsoever,’ Merry contradicted with pleasure. ‘I’m a virgin and I’m not trading that for some sleazy night with my boss.’

‘A virgin?’ Angel was aghast. ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously,’ Merry traded without embarrassment, reflecting on how her mother had fallen pregnant with her and determined to make every choice that took her in the opposite direction. ‘Sex should mean something more than scratching an itch.’

Angel sprang upright behind his desk, all supple, graceful motion, the fine, expensive fabric of his suit pulling taut over powerful thigh muscles and definable biceps. Her mouth ran dry, her eyes involuntarily clinging to his every movement. ‘It’s never been anything more for me,’ he admitted drily. ‘But I take offence at the word “sleazy”. I am never sleazy and... I don’t do virgins.’

‘Good to know,’ Merry breathed tightly, watching his shirt ripple ever so slightly over his muscular chest as he exhaled while cursing her intense physical awareness of him. ‘May I go home now?’

‘I’ll drop you back.’

‘That’s not necessary,’ she told him coolly.

‘I decide what’s necessary around here,’ Angel pronounced, throwing the door wide and heading for the lift. ‘You realise you’re as rare as a unicorn in my world? Are you holding out for marriage?’

Involuntarily amused by his curiosity, Merry laughed. ‘Of course not. I’m just waiting for something real. I’m not a fan of casual or meaningless.’

Angel lounged back fluidly against the wall of the lift, all naked predator and jungle grace. ‘I’m casual but I’m very real,’ he told her huskily, his deep dark drawl roughening and trickling down her taut spine like a spectral caress.

‘Oh, switch it off,’ Merry groaned. ‘We’re like salt and pepper except you can’t mix us.’

‘Because you’ve got too many rules, too many barriers. Why is that?’

‘Like you are actually interested?’ Merry jibed.

‘I am interested,’ Angel growled, dark golden eyes flashing as the lift doors sprang back. ‘I want you.’

‘Only because you can’t have me,’ Merry interposed drily, her skin coming up in gooseflesh as he flashed her a ferocious appraisal capable of flaying her skin from her bones. ‘That’s how basic you are.’

‘You’re becoming rude.’

‘Your persistence is making me rude,’ Merry told him.

‘I want to see your hair loose,’ Angel bit out impatiently. ‘It’s unusually long.’

‘My mother kept on cutting it short when I was little because it was easier to look after. Now I grow it because I can,’ she said truthfully, her stomach flipping as he shot a sudden charismatic smile at her, his lean, darkly beautiful face vibrant with amusement.

‘You’re a control freak,’ he breathed lazily. ‘Takes one to know one, glikia mou.’

‘That’s why we don’t get on,’ Merry pointed out.

‘We don’t get on because you have a very annoying sort of pious vibe going,’ Angel contradicted. ‘You’re smug.’

‘No, I’m not,’ she argued instantly as they crossed the half-empty car park.

‘You think you’re superior to me because you’re not at the mercy of your hormones...but you were when I touched you,’ Angel breathed, caging her in against the passenger door of his car, the heat of his lean, powerful body perceptible even through the inches separating them and the rich, evocative scent of husky male and exotic cologne filling her nostrils. His hands braced either side of her, not actually touching her quivering length, and her knees turned weak at the thought that he might touch her. ‘You can hardly breathe when I’m this close to you. I see that, I know that...every time I try to step back, it sucks me back in.’

He was like an impenetrable force field surrounding her. She knew she could push him away, she knew he wouldn’t fight, she knew he wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want him to do and a weird sense of unexpected power engulfed her. He was still coming back at her because he couldn’t resist the pull between them and she couldn’t resist it either. It was a weakness deep down inside her that she couldn’t suppress. Nobody had ever made her feel the way he was making her feel and that was a thrill on its own, a shot of adrenalin in her veins to match the feverish pound of her heartbeat. She wanted him. The knowledge ploughed through her like a battering ram, casting everything she had thought she knew about herself into a broken jumble of messy pieces.

‘You’re not my type,’ she whispered in dry-mouthed protest.

‘You’re not my type either,’ Angel admitted thickly. ‘But I’d still have sex in a car park with you any time you cared to ask.’

‘Not about to ask,’ Merry confided shakily. ‘Take me home...back off.’

‘You’re making a major production of this again,’ Angel accused, flashing his key fob to open the car. ‘Stop doing that. It’s...it’s bizarrely unnerving.’

She climbed into his car in a daze, the throb between her legs angry and unsettling, the sensual smoulder in the air almost unbearable, every nerve ending painfully aware of it. She didn’t know how he did that using only words and looks. It was terrifying. He had wiped her mind clean, made her feel stuff she didn’t want to feel, rocked the foundations of her security.

‘I don’t like you,’ she admitted.

‘Thee mou...you don’t have to like me, you only have to want me...and you do.’

And it was agonisingly true, she registered in dismay. Her brain didn’t seem to have anything to do with the equation. She thoroughly disapproved of everything he was and yet the chemistry between them was wild and dominant.

‘We have one night together and sate the craving. Then we put it away and bury it,’ Angel intoned in a driven undertone.

‘I thought you didn’t do virgins.’

‘Evidently you were born to be my single exception.’

‘Is this an actual negotiation?’ Merry enquired incredulously.

‘We have to sort this out. You’re taking my mind off work,’ Angel complained. ‘I can’t handle watching you all day and fantasising about you all night. It’s bad for business.’

‘What’s in it for me?’ Merry whispered unevenly.

‘I’m superlative at sex.’

‘Oh...’ Her lashes fluttered, her tummy somersaulting again as she wondered if she really was about to do what he wanted her to do, what she herself wanted to do. And that was the answer there and then when she was least expecting to see or understand it.

He would make a great introduction to sex for her, she thought dizzily. It would end the insane craving he had awakened inside her and maybe then she could return to her normal tranquil self. That prospect had huge appeal for her. The need would be satisfied, the intolerable longing ended. All right, it wasn’t the big romance with hearts and flowers that she had dimly envisioned, but then possibly that had never been a very practical aspiration. What he was offering was basic and honest even if it was casual and uncommitted and everything she had once sworn she would never participate in. It was not as though she had been saving herself for a wedding ring. She had been saving herself for love, but love hadn’t happened.

‘So, you’re suggesting that I just use you,’ Merry remarked grittily as he pulled into another underground car park.

‘We use each other,’ Angel exhaled in a rush and, killing the engine, stretched out a long powerful arm to enclose her in almost the same moment.