A Secret Seduction: A Secret Until Now / A Sinful Seduction / Secrets of a Shy Socialite

Lying there, she managed to simultaneously look as sexy as hell and damned, throat-achingly vulnerable.

‘Are you all right?’ Concern added a layer of gravel to his deep voice.

She didn’t leap out of her skin, but only because she had felt his shadow blocking the sun a fraction of a second before he spoke. Still stinging from his unfair comments in the boat, she imagined the expression of impatience on his lean face. In her head she could see him glancing at his watch, thinking, That bloody woman again!

She raised herself onto her elbows but didn’t lift her gaze. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, arching her foot to rub the sand off one foot with the red-painted toes of the other.

His eyes on the top of her dark head, he wondered how she managed to make the assurance sound much the same as go away—it was a talent. He was sorely tempted to do just that. If she was so determined to put herself in a hospital, who was he to stop her?

Unaware that he had chosen that moment to drop gracefully into a squatting position beside her, Angel started to sit upright. The near collision of their heads drew a tiny gasp of alarm from her throat. Rocking back on his heels, he remained, from Angel’s point of view, far too close!

He still didn’t have his shirt on, and he made her think of a particularly sexy pirate. How embarrassing that she couldn’t stop staring at his chest; her eyes were welded there.

‘I’m fine,’ she croaked, thinking this comment had rarely in her life been less true.

‘You’re working on the theory that if you say it more than once it makes it so.’ He didn’t sound amused; he sounded exasperated.

‘It is so.’ Teeth pressing into the pink softness of her full lower lip, she finally managed to drag her eyes upwards and discovered that he wasn’t looking impatient or even angry. He was looking worried and concerned, and instead of being mollified by the discovery she was thrown into an instant state of heart-pounding confusion. With Alex it seemed a condition she spent about ninety per cent of her time in.

From the tangled muddle of emotions lodged like a heavy stone in her chest, anger and resentment dissolved. Without them she felt oddly defenceless; she didn’t know how to deal with his concern. Who are you kidding, Angel? You don’t know how to deal with him full stop! The man was the father of her child and he was a total stranger—a pulse-racingly disturbing total stranger.

Well, one solution would be to get to know him, she thought. He’s right here. Stop snarling and start talking. Was picking fights with him a way that she had subconsciously adopted to delay the moment she told him about Jasmine? She tried to push the idea away but it lingered...as did the scent of his soap in her nostrils.

‘I really am all right. I was just escaping the fuss.... How about the boy?’

‘He doesn’t seem any the worse for the experience,’ Alex commented drily. ‘He was posing for photos when I left.... What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You winced.’

She expelled an exasperated sigh of surrender and snapped. ‘My head hurts. It’s nothing.’ Compared to last night it was true. She turned her head, giving a little grunt of relief when she saw that the skin on her shoulder was not broken. It was sore, though.

Growing irritation made his jaw clench again. She had managed to make it sound as if it were his fault.

‘Let me see.’

She turned her head away. ‘No, I didn’t hit it. I just have a headache.’

‘Headaches don’t leave bruises.’ His long brown fingers, their touch delicate but firm, pushed aside the saturated strands of hair from her forehead, causing her eyes to fly wide and green to his face, the frantic fluttering sensation that began in the pit of her stomach and spread hot and dangerously fast making her pull away while she could.

The subsequent jolt caused her bruised shoulder to ache.

‘Leave me alone.’

The words mocked Alex even as her belligerent emerald eyes taunted him.

Leave her alone!

That’s your problem, Alex thought grimly. You can’t.

Six years ago he hadn’t been able to and he still couldn’t. From the moment he had seen her he had wanted her and that hunger had not decreased. If anything it had grown and it didn’t matter how aggravating, how sheer bloody minded she was, no negative was negative enough to make him any less hot for her.

Around this woman his self-control was zero. Even the fact she had just been involved in an accident didn’t save her from his lust. No, lust he could cope with, but this ability she had to draw emotional responses from him was something he was not willing to recognise, let alone deal with.

‘You’re bloody lucky all you have is a headache!’

The fresh blast of disapproval hurt but at least it enabled her to throw off the weird feeling of vulnerability.

‘Do you have to yell?’ She framed a pained furrow between her darkly defined brows. ‘I’m not deaf.’ Or needy, she reminded herself.

His jaw tightened and the memory of her putting herself between the blades of the Jet Ski and the child resurfaced to increase his rage. ‘Do you ever think about the consequences of your actions?’

It was the consequences of both their actions that she had been living with for six years. ‘I accept them,’ she told him quietly. ‘How about you?’ Well, she was going to find out the answer to that one very soon.

He ignored the wry interjection and barely registered her sudden look of panic. ‘We are not talking about me. I’m talking about your publicity-seeking stunt.’

Her temper fizzed. ‘A stunt! You think I arranged that?’

Alex didn’t, but the thought had flashed through his mind. ‘No, I don’t think you’ve got the brains....’ he admitted, an edge of weariness entering his voice as he added, ‘Do you ever think before you leap or jump?’

She fixed him with an evil-eyed stare. ‘You’re right, I didn’t think. Story of my life!’ She sniffed. ‘If I had thought, do you think I’d have wasted my virginity on a selfish, lying bastard who let me think he was married just to get out the door?’

She closed her eyes to blot out the expression stamped on his face. The man didn’t just look shocked, he looked as though someone had aimed a loaded revolver at him and pulled the trigger.

The words didn’t just hang in the air, they vibrated, the volume growing with each beat of her heart. Unfortunately, there was no way she could retrieve them because, true to form, she’d done it again. She’d blurted out the truth at the worst moment imaginable. Way to go, Angel, out to personally disprove the old adage that wisdom came with age.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘YOU’RE TRYING TO tell me... No... No, you were not a virgin!’ Even as Alex voiced the denial his brain was making connections that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen before.

‘’Course not. What can I say? I have a sick sense of humour.’

Angel’s eyes were closed, squeezed tight like a little kid who thought the action made her invisible.

‘You were.’ He dragged a hand through his hair and got to his feet, walking several steps away before stalking back to stand over her. ‘You were a virgin, and you acted like a damned...’

‘Damned what?’ she challenged, getting to her feet.

He just looked at her and shook his head, groaning. ‘Theos!’

She shrugged, wrapping her arms around herself, cold despite the afternoon heat. Shock, she speculated, viewing the tremors that were shaking her body with a weird objectivity. The genie was out of the bottle, the truth was out there and she couldn’t get it back, so she did the only thing possible—she downplayed it like mad!

‘Let’s not make a big deal of it. A girl’s got to lose it some time.’

‘You think this is a subject for cheap jokes? It was a big deal. It is a big deal—to me and it should be to you.’ He hadn’t even been Emma’s first lover, and it had not been important to him. For some men perhaps there was an appeal in teaching a novice the ropes, but it was a responsibility that he would have actively avoided had the opportunity ever arisen. It hadn’t—or so he had thought.

‘I’m sorry if my ability to laugh at ancient history offends you, but it was a long time ago and life moves on.’ And it also occasionally threw some surprises, and the surprise today was the strength of Alex’s reaction to the news. He was still pale beneath his tan. ‘There has to be a first time for everyone—it’s the second time that can be more problematic.’ She cleared her throat and, regretting the reference to her nonexistent sex life, hurriedly tacked on a laughing, ‘Even you.’

She lifted her eyes to his face and her smile faded. It was impossible to imagine Alex being young and inexperienced, his face smooth, his eyes without cynicism.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’ he blasted.

His indignation continued to strike her as pretty perverse. ‘I don’t recall conversation being very high on the agenda.’ She forced the words past the tight constriction in her throat. ‘Would it have made any difference if I’d told you?’

Alex opened his mouth and closed it again. It was a good question and he’d have liked to think it would, but on that day he had not been thinking with his brain.

‘I resent being made to feel like some sort of bloody predator.’

He resented! ‘Well, I’m so sorry I’ve made you feel a victim, but I guess it’s a responsibility I’ll have to live with.’

The saccharine insincerity dripping from her sarcastic retort brought a defining flash of colour to the knife-edged contours of his carved cheekbones.

‘Did you set out that day with the intention of—?’ He bit down on the question, but not soon enough to stop Angel’s eyes sparking afresh with anger.

‘Sure,’ she drawled, disguising her hurt with a sarcastic tone. ‘I engineered the whole thing.’

A muscle alongside his mouth clenched as their eyes connected, sizzling blue on flashing green. ‘You can’t leave anything, can you?’ he charged. Like the fact you acted like a total irresponsible bastard, Alex? ‘I know it wasn’t your fault,’ he gritted through clenched teeth. ‘It was my bloody...’ He stopped abruptly. ‘You said the second time was the problem.’ He shook his head, not following the crazy idea to its equally crazy conclusion.

‘Did I?’ she said, thinking did this man miss nothing? She adopted a sweetly insincere smile and hid behind the truth. ‘Oh, yes, you’ve guessed it. You spoiled me for any other man, Alex.’

Responding to her mockery with a curt, unsmiling, ‘Except for the father of your child,’ he extended a hand to her.

Staring at the hand, not the man she nodded. ‘Oh, yes, there is him.’ And there was Jasmine.

And Jasmine’s father.

Oh, God! She knew the delay with coming clean was not making things better, quite the opposite, in fact. With a sigh she dropped her head into her hands and began to scrub her eyes with the heels of her palms. She felt a surge of despairing disgust as she asked herself where was the woman who never avoided an awkward issue but met it head on?

As she tilted her head to look at him her hair fell back, revealing the beginning of a bruise on her temple. Staring at the discoloration, Alex felt his stomach muscles lurch and tighten with an emotion as strong as his previous anger and totally inexplicable.... Only a madman would feel protective towards this provocative witch with her smart mouth and her combative attitude.

He was not a madman. It was her sanity that was the issue here; her insane behaviour was what he was here to challenge, although the conversation had drifted somewhat. Time to refocus, Alex, he thought.

‘That was a crazy thing you did.’ Also brave; the private concession was made reluctantly. It was hard not to admire this woman’s fearlessness—at least from a distance. For those close to her it must make life hell, he thought grimly. ‘You could have killed yourself....’

He closed his eyes, seeing the scene again and experiencing the same awful sense of helplessness. The memory remained like an icy fist in his chest as he glared at her and spelt out the fact she seemed incapable of grasping. ‘You could be dead.’

‘I can’t die. I have Jasmine,’ she asserted confidently. It was a simple fact. Jasmine would have been without a mother and that couldn’t happen.... It nearly had!

Like a tower of cards her confidence slipped away. Oh, God, he was right. She was a mother—she couldn’t go around leaping in without thinking.

‘I’m a terrible mother!’

Hearing the anguished wail and seeing the tears rolling silently down her cheeks cut through the righteous anger that gripped him like a hot blade through butter. He was unable and unwilling to identify the emotion that tightened in his chest as tenderness, but he dropped back down beside her. His time when he touched her she did not pull away as though he were poison. Instead she leaned into him, melted into him softly, shaking her head on his chest.

One moment he was fighting the urge to throttle her, the next he was fighting an equally primal desire to comfort her. His emotions did one of those three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shifts that seemed to happen around her.

‘What if—?’

‘You have lived to tell the tale. There is no point in what ifs. So how old is she, your daughter... Jasmine?’ He spoke not out of genuine interest but a need to distract her. At the same time he ran a soothing hand over her wet hair, lifting it off her neck; the texture of her warm, damp skin beneath fascinated him.

‘She’s started school. Well, she had.’

‘Had?’

‘She was off a term as she wasn’t well, but she’s having some home tutoring and she’ll soon catch up. She’s smart.’

The audible pride in her muffled response caused his hand to still, though the dark strands of her wet hair remained coiled around his fingers. It was difficult for him to see her as a mother but, he thought to himself, You don’t have the exclusive on family feeling, Alex.

‘She’s better now?’ he asked, giving her time to regain control.

Angel nodded into his chest. ‘I took some time off but this opportunity was too good—’ He felt her stiffen before she pulled away from him. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she regarded him with a defiance that was echoed in her addition. ‘I suppose you don’t think mothers should work?’

She clearly expected his judgement. And why not, Alex? You’ve done little else but judge so far.

Quick to judge and slow to forgive. The words of his mother, a sad observation that he had lived to understand the meaning of but that had meant little to him when she’d spoken them soon after his half-sister had appeared like a disruptive whirlwind in their lives.

‘I know nothing of the pressures of being a mother...or a parent.’ His brow creased as he admitted, ‘I still struggle to think of you as one.’

‘A mother or an actual person, not a body that looks good in a bikini?’ Before he could respond to the bitter accusation she added wearily, ‘Being a mother is one job where experience is not a prerequisite.’

‘There’s nothing on your website that mentioned you have a daughter. Is that a professional thing?’

‘You’re not the only one who likes their privacy.’ She blinked her sooty lashes over wide emerald eyes as her voice dropped an astonished husky octave. ‘You looked me up?’

‘I was curious.’

So was she, and maybe it was the hint of evasiveness in his manner but she suddenly heard herself asking the question that she’d heard many people voice, but that as yet had no satisfactory answer. Everyone had theories but nobody could really understand why they were being allowed access to the private island.

‘Why are you giving us access to Saronia?’ The moment the words left her lips she regretted them, but it was too late to back off. ‘They say you’ve refused royal requests.’ Why would a man who’d refused honeymooning royals open his doors—or at least a restricted area of his shoreline—to them?

‘Do they?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You know they do.’

‘So what is your theory?’

She lifted a hand to shade her eyes. It was a bit late in the day to make out that she hadn’t thought about it, but she tried anyway. ‘I don’t have one, but if I had to guess I’d go with those who think it’s a bored, rich man’s whim, unless you really are thinking of expanding into cosmetics?’ Apparently the rumour had gone viral.

‘Are you asking for insider information?’

‘Hardly. The rumour has already sent the firm’s shares through the ceiling. Even we mere models have been known to read the financial pages,’ she observed, quite pleased to have surprised him. Her smug grin vanished as he hitched a brow and, holding her eyes with his, touched the sole of her foot with his finger. The light, barely there contact made her stomach dissolve and her toes curl of their own volition.

‘Has no one suggested that it is because I wanted to have you at my mercy?’

She fought against the seductive quality of his deep voice, hating that he was mocking her. ‘Now, that really would make me feel special.’

He shrugged and grinned. ‘No mystery. My nephew asked me to further his career.’

‘And you’re a very nice uncle who does favours for your nephew?’

‘It has been known, but I am an adequate uncle. It isn’t hard—Nico is a nice kid, and it pays to keep on the right side of my sister, Adriana.’

‘Do you have much family?’ she asked, thinking to herself, You have one more than you think.

‘My parents died some time ago in a car accident. I have two sisters.... There is Adriana—she’s ten years older than me.’ His mobile lips twisted into a half smile as he surprised her by confiding, ‘I was an afterthought.’

‘This is Nico’s mother?’

He tipped his head in acknowledgment. ‘Her husband, Gus, was an international lawyer based in Geneva, but now he runs the Greek operation. They have just the one son.’

‘You said you had two sisters?’

There was a long pause.

‘Lizzie is your age.’

Lizzie did not strike Angel as a very Greek or Russian name. ‘I thought you said you were the youngest?’

‘Lizzie is my half-sister, the result of an affair—actually a one-night stand.’ The small shocked sound that escaped her throat awoke him to the fact that he had just revealed more private details in the past thirty seconds than he had in the past... Actually ever. ‘The details are not important.’ Just the sort of thing that blew a family apart. ‘As I said, she is my half-sister, the baby of the family.’

‘And you resent her existence?’

The speculation drew a heavy frown and a flash of anger. ‘Nobody in the world could resent Lizzie.’ Except his mother, who could have but had not.

The softening in his expression when he spoke of his half-sister could not have been feigned. It could be envied, though she was dismayed to discover she did not envy this girl who brought the warmth to his eyes. One thing Angel did not want to be was his sister!

‘So your parents’ marriage broke down.’ Angel, who knew how that felt, was sympathetic.

Being taken away from the only home she had ever known and the father she had adored at age eight had been a trauma that had stayed with Angel. In her youthful eyes it had seemed as if she was being punished. What other explanation could there be? Her feelings had alternated between guilt for some unknown sin she must have committed and anger at her father for sending her away.

She had been acting up during one of their short visits to their father when her big brother had sat her down and spelled a few facts out.

‘You can act like a spoilt brat and ruin our time here or you can enjoy it. This isn’t Dad’s fault or mine or yours.’

‘But Mum doesn’t want us!’

‘Sure.’ Her brother had held the fists that were punching him in sheer frustration and explained quietly, ‘But she doesn’t want Dad to have us more than she doesn’t want us. Do you get it, kiddo?’

Angel had, sort of, in her childish way. ‘I think I hate her, Cesare.’ She had whispered the confession because she knew this was a bad thing.

Cesare hadn’t said she was bad; he had simply shrugged and retorted, ‘Why bother? She’s not worth it. Just remember when we’re old enough she can’t keep us and then we can live where we like.’

‘Here at the castle with Dad?’

‘Sure,’ her brother had agreed, handing her a tissue and advising her to wash her face and brush her hair because she looked like a banshee.

‘My father betrayed my mother, she forgave him, there was no divorce.’ Angel sighed a sad smile, curving her lips as she dragged her thoughts back to the present. They had gone back to the Scottish castle of their childhoods but there had been no Dad. He had died and Cesare had inherited the ailing highland estate along with responsibility for its debts.

‘You were lucky.’

His astonished stare fastened on her face as he sneered, ‘How do you figure that one?’

‘Divorce is not a good thing and a mother who forgives is...’ Head tilted a little to one side, she studied his face. ‘But you didn’t, did you?’

‘What?’

‘Forgive him.’ He was quick to hide it but Angel saw the shock move at the back of his eyes, followed by a cold, closed look.

‘It was not my place to forgive.’ And now it was too late to tell the father he had idolised that he understood the weakness... How could he not when he was staring at his own in the face? ‘Though, yes, with the arrogance of youth I did judge. Having indulged in a one-night stand, I am in the classic glass-house-stone-throwing position.’

There was a delicious dark irony that he had blamed his father for not taking responsibility for the consequences of his actions.... Unprotected sex—how stupid is that? He heard the scornful words of his younger self and they still had the power to make him flinch.

The only reason he had not found himself in a similar situation was not down to higher moral standards or even basic common sense, but pure luck!

‘So it isn’t normal— You...you don’t—’ She broke off, flushing.

‘Sleep with women I have just met? Actually no. Though I can understand why you made that assumption given how we met. That makes you unique on two levels—my only virgin and my only one-night stand,’ he remarked bleakly. ‘How about you?’

‘I thought you’d already decided that a model is an easy lay.’

He winced and frowned at the crudity while uneasily accepting its factual accuracy. ‘I was not enquiring about your sexual history.’

‘Oh, I see, you just want to know the real me?’ She widened her eyes. ‘Where do I begin? My political views or my favourite author? Let’s see, I’m a Pisces, I drink too much coffee and my favourite colour is green....’

‘Do you always make a joke when things get too personal?’

Shocked that he had recognised the self-defence mechanism so easily, she shook her head in an angry negative motion, but before she could follow up with a firm denial he asked a question that, even though she knew was inspired by idle curiosity not suspicion, almost tipped her over into outright panic.

‘Where is she, your daughter, now?’

Not here, thank goodness.... Angel shuddered to imagine how she would have reacted if fate had thrown this man in her path when Jas had been with her.

‘At home, in Scotland, with Ce...’ She stopped, remembering that he knew Cesare and not wanting him to make the link between her and her brother until she was ready. ‘I always know she’s safe with him.’

The mention of the other man and the perceptible loosening of the tension in her body language when she mentioned him caused muscles along Alex’s taut jaw to clench.

He rarely found himself taken by surprise but he was. Having established that the father was not involved in the upbringing of the child, it had not occurred to him to question whether another man was. And considering he was a man who was justifiably famed for factoring in all possibilities when he approached a project, in retrospect it seemed astonishing that he had not foreseen any other outcome, when engineering a situation where their paths would cross, other than them falling into bed together. He had not been willing to contemplate failure.