The Secret Valtinos Baby: The Secret Valtinos Baby

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‘My goodness, you were organised,’ she mumbled in surprise as he strode down the path and leant down into his car, straightening to peel off the offending sweater and expose the flexing muscles of his bronzed and powerful torso. Her mouth ran dry and she stared, watching him pull on another sweater, black this time, before she closed the door.

She ignored her reeling senses to concentrate on what was truly important. Angel was unpredictable, she reminded herself worriedly, devious to a fault and dangerously volatile. What did he truly want from her? Why was he putting himself to so much trouble? Lunch? All of a sudden he was bringing her lunch? Merry was stunned by the concept and the planning that must have gone into that. Did Angel really want access to his daughter that badly? Did he have sufficient interest and staying power to want a long-term relationship with his daughter? And where did that leave her when she really didn’t want Angel to feature anywhere in her life?

You should’ve thought of that before you let him visit, Merry told herself in exasperation. Possibly Angel was only trying to smooth over the hostilities between them. And possibly she was a suspicious little shrew, still bitter and battered from her previous encounters with him. At the very least she ought to acknowledge that she would never ever second-guess Angel Valtinos and that he would always take her by surprise. After all, that was how he did business and how he thrived in a cut-throat world.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ubf70d473-7f76-55dc-acf7-a65ac9c804cf)

MERRY SHOOK HANDS with her new client, who had got into a mess with his tax returns, and promised to update him on the situation within the week. Soon she would have to try to fit in a refresher course to update her knowledge of recent legislative changes, she reflected thoughtfully, incredibly keen to think of anything other than the awareness that Angel was sliding supple as a dancer out of his car as her visitor departed.

Sybil had swooped in to take enthusiastic charge of Elyssa soon after Angel’s earlier departure. Hearing of the lunch plan, she had laughed and drily observed, ‘He’s treating you to a charm offensive. Well, if you must have a serious talk with him, it’ll be easier not to have Elyssa grizzling for her lunch and her nap in the midst of it. Phone me when you want to steal her back.’

And once again, Merry had reflected how very, very lucky she had always been to have Sybil in her life, standing by her when life was tough, advising and supporting her, in short being the only caring mother figure that she had ever known. Sybil had cured the hurts inflicted by her kid sister’s lack of interest in and impatience with her child and, although Merry knew her aunt had been disappointed when she became pregnant without being in a serious relationship, she had kept her disappointment to herself and had instead focused her attention on how best to help her expectant niece.

‘Lunch,’ Angel told her carelessly, carting a large luxurious hamper in one hand.

‘I’ve got a terrace out the back. Since it’s sunny, we might as well eat there,’ Merry suggested, preferring the idea of that casual setting in which she thought Angel would be less intimidating.

‘This is unexpectedly pleasant,’ Angel remarked, sprawling down with innate grace on a wrought-iron chair and taking in the pleasant view of fields and wooded hills visible beyond the hedge.

‘This was Sybil’s Christmas surprise for us,’ Merry explained. ‘Her last tenant was elderly and the garden was overgrown. Sybil hired someone to fix it up and now Elyssa will have somewhere safe to play when she’s more mobile.’

‘You’re very close to your aunt,’ Angel commented warily. ‘She doesn’t like me.’

Crystalline blue eyes collided with his in challenge. ‘What did you expect?’ she traded.

Angel had not been prepared to meet with a condemnation that bold and unapologetic and his teeth clenched, squaring his aggressive jaw, the faint dark shadow of stubble already roughening his bronzed skin accentuating the hard slant of his shapely mouth.

‘Yes, you ensured I had enough money to survive but that was that,’ Merry stated before he could remind her of the reality.

Angel sidestepped that deeply controversial issue by ignoring it. Instead he opened the hamper and stacked utensils and dishes on the table and asked where his daughter was. After all, what could he say about his treatment of Merry? The facts were the facts and he couldn’t change them. He knew he had done everything wrong and he had acknowledged that. Didn’t his honesty and his regret lighten the scales even a little? Was she expecting him to grovel on hands and knees?

‘Wow...this is some spread,’ Merry remarked uneasily as she set out the food and he uncorked the bottle of wine and filled the glasses with rich red liquid. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘From one of my hotels,’ Angel responded with the nonchalance that was the sole preserve of the very rich.

Merry placed a modest selection of savoury bites on her plate and said tensely, ‘What did you want to discuss?’

‘Our future,’ Angel delivered succinctly while Tiger sat at his feet with little round pleading eyes pinned to the meat on his fork.

‘Nobody can foretell the future,’ Merry objected.

‘I can where we’re concerned,’ Angel assured her, every liquid syllable cool as ice. ‘Either we spend at least the next ten years fighting it out over Elyssa in court or...we get married and share her.’

Merry studied him over the top of her wine glass with steadily widening pale blue eyes, and then gulped in more wine than she intended and coughed and spluttered in the most embarrassing manner as she struggled to get a grip on her wildly fluctuating emotions. First he had frightened the life out of her by mentioning a court battle over her beloved daughter, and then he’d sent her spinning with a suggestion she had never dreamt that she would hear from his lips.

‘Married?’ she emphasised with a curled lip. ‘Are you crazy or just trying to unnerve me?’

Having forced himself to pull the pin on the marriage grenade straight away, Angel coiled back in his chair and savoured his wine. ‘It’s an unnerving idea for me as well. Apart from my mother, who wanders in and out of my properties, I’ve never lived with a woman before,’ he admitted curtly. ‘But we do need to think creatively to solve our current problems.’

‘I don’t have any problems right now. I also can’t believe that you want Elyssa so much after one little meeting that you would sink to what is virtually blackmail,’ Merry framed coldly, eyes glinting like chipped ice in the sunlight.

‘Oh, I would sink a lot lower than that and I think you know it,’ Angel traded without shame, unyielding dark golden eyes steady with stubborn resolve. ‘I will do whatever I have to do to get what I want...or in this case to ensure that my daughter benefits from a suitable home.’

‘But Elyssa already has a suitable home,’ Merry pointed out, working hard to stay calm and appear untouched by his threat of legal intervention. ‘We’re happy here. I have work that I can do at home and we have a decent life.’

‘Only not by my standards. Elyssa is my heir and will one day be a very wealthy woman. When you’re so prejudiced against spending my money, how do you expect her to adapt to my world when she becomes independent?’ he demanded with lethal cool.

Merry compressed her sultry mouth and lifted angrily out of her seat. ‘I’m not prejudiced!’ she protested. ‘I didn’t want to depend on your money. I simply prefer to stand on my own feet.’

Angel dealt her a perceptive appraisal that made her skin tighten uneasily over her bones. ‘Like me, you have trust issues and you’re very proud.’

‘Don’t you tell me that I have trust issues when you know absolutely nothing about me!’ Merry practically spat back at him in her fury. ‘Newsflash, Angel...we had two sexual encounters, not a relationship!’

Angel ran lingering hooded dark eyes over her slender figure and her aggressive stance, remembering that fire in bed, how it had stoked his own and resulted in a conflagration more passionate than anything he had ever known. As a rule, she kept that fire hidden, suppressed beneath her tranquil, prissy little surface, but around him she couldn’t manage that feat and he cherished that truth. Anger was much more promising than indifference.

Merry planted her hands on her curvy hips and flung him a fierce look of censure. ‘And don’t you dare look at me like that!’ she warned him, helplessly conscious of that smouldering sexual assessment. ‘It’s rude and inappropriate.’

Angel shifted lithely in his chair, murderously aware of his roaring arousal and the tightness of his jeans and marvelling at the reality that he could actually be enjoying himself in her company, difficult though she was. A slow-burning smile slashed his lean, strong face. ‘The burn is still there, glyka mou,’ he told her. ‘But let’s concentrate our energies on my solution for our future.’

‘That wasn’t a solution, that was fanciful nonsense!’ Merry hissed back at him. ‘You don’t want to marry me. You don’t want to marry anybody!’

‘But I’ll do it for Elyssa’s benefit because I believe that she needs a father as much as she needs a mother,’ Angel asserted levelly. ‘A father is not expendable. My father was very important in my life, even though he wasn’t able to be there for me as much as he would have liked.’

Unprepared for that level of honesty and gravity from a man as naturally secretive and aloof as Angel, Merry was bemused. ‘I never said you were expendable, for goodness’ sake,’ she argued less angrily. ‘That’s why I let you finally visit and meet her.’

‘How much of a relationship did you have with your own father?’ Angel enquired lethally.

Merry’s face froze. ‘I didn’t have one. My mother, Natalie, fell pregnant by her boss and he was married. I met him once but his wife couldn’t stand the sight of me, probably because I was the proof of his infidelity,’ she conceded uncomfortably. ‘He never asked to see me again. When it came to making a choice between me and his wife, naturally he chose his wife.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Angel disconcerted her with a look of sympathy that hurt her pride as much as a slap would have done.

‘Well, I’m not. I got by fine without him,’ Merry declared, lifting her chin.

‘Maybe you did.’ Angel trailed out the word, letting her know he wasn’t convinced by her face-saving claim. ‘But others don’t do so well without paternal guidance. My own mother grew up indulged in every financial way, but essentially without parents who cared enough about her to discipline her. She’s well past fifty now, although she doesn’t look it, but she’s still a rebellious teenager in her own head. I want my daughter to have stability. I don’t want her to go wild when she becomes an adult with the world at her feet along with every temptation.’

Involuntarily impressed by that argument, Merry shook her head. ‘That’s a long way off and if I don’t stand in the way of her having a relationship with you now, you’ll still be around.’

Angel lounged back in his chair and crossed an ankle over one knee, long, powerful thigh muscles flexing below tight, faded denim. He looked outrageously relaxed, as if he were posing for a publicity shot, and drop-dead gorgeous from the spill of glossy black curls to the golden caramel brilliance of his eyes. Merry dragged her guilty gaze from his thighs and his crotch, sudden heat rising inside her and burning her cheeks. His hard-boned, thoroughly raunchy masculine beauty broke through her defences every time she looked at him and it made her feel like a breathless fan girl.

‘But the bottom line is that unless we marry I won’t be around enough,’ Angel intoned with grim emphasis. ‘I spend at least fifty per cent of the year abroad. I want her to meet my relatives and learn what it means to be a Valtinos...’

He could have said nothing more calculated to cool Merry’s fevered response to him. Dismay filled her because she understood the message he was giving her. As soon as Elyssa was old enough, Angel would be spiriting her out to Greece, taking her away from her mother, leaving Merry behind, shorn of control of what happened in her child’s life. It was a sobering prospect.

‘Did you mean it...what you said about fighting me in court?’ Merry prompted angrily.

‘For once in my life I was playing it straight,’ Angel declared.

‘But where the heck did all this suddenly come from?’ Merry demanded in heated denial. ‘You didn’t want anything to do with us last winter!’

‘It took time for me to come to terms with how I felt about fatherhood. At first I thought the most important objective was to conserve my world as it was. I thought I could turn my back on you and my child but I found that I couldn’t,’ Angel breathed in a roughened undertone as though the words were being extracted forcibly from him. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about her...or you.’

‘Me?’ Merry gasped in sharp disbelief. ‘Why would you have been thinking about me?’

Angel lifted and dropped a broad shoulder in questioning doubt. ‘So, I’m human. Learning that a woman is carrying your child is an unexpectedly powerful discovery—’

‘Angel,’ Merry cut in without hesitation, ‘let’s come back down to earth here. Learning that I was pregnant sent you into retreat so fast you left a smoke trail in your wake!’

‘And all I learned was that there was no place to run from reality,’ Angel countered with sardonic bite. ‘I fought my curiosity for a long time before I finally gave way to it and asked to see her. You said no repeatedly but here we are now, supposedly acting like adults. I’m trying to be honest... I’m trying not to threaten you but I’ve come to see marriage as the best option for all three of us.’

‘You threatened me quite deliberately!’ Merry slung at him furiously.

‘You need to know that I’m serious and that this is not some whim that will go away if you wait for long enough. I’m here to stay in your lives,’ Angel intoned harshly.

‘Well, that’s going to be rather awkward when it’s not what I want and I will fight you every step of the way!’ Merry flung back at him. ‘You wanted me out of your life and I got out. You can’t force me back.’

‘If it means my daughter gets the future she deserves, I will force you,’ Angel bit out in a raw, wrathful undertone as he plunged upright, casting a long dark shadow over the table. ‘You need to accept that this is not just about you and me any more, it’s about her!’

Merry paled. ‘I do accept that.’

‘No, you don’t. You’re still set on punishing me for the selfish decisions I made and that approach isn’t going to get us anywhere. I don’t want to go to court and fight but I will if I have no alternative!’ Angel shot at her furiously, dark golden eyes scorching, his Greek accent edging every vowel with piercing sibilance in the afternoon stillness. ‘When I asked you to marry me I was trying to show respect!’

‘You wouldn’t know respect if it bit you on the arse!’ Merry flamed back at him with helpless vulgarity. ‘And I am so sorry I didn’t grovel with gratitude at the offer of a wedding ring the way you obviously expected.’

‘No, you’re not sorry!’ Angel roared back at her equally loudly. ‘You enjoyed dragging me over the coals, questioning my motivation and commitment, and not for one minute did you seriously consider what I was offering...’

‘Stop shouting at me!’ Merry warned him, reeling in shock from that sudden volatile surge of anger from him, not having appreciated that that rage could lie so close to his seemingly cool surface.

‘I’ve said sorry every damn way I know how but you’re after revenge, not a way forward, and there’s nothing I can do to change that!’ Angel growled, throwing open the back door to go back into the house and leave.

There was sufficient truth in that stormy welter of accusations to draw Merry up short and make her question her attitude. ‘I’m not after revenge...that’s ridiculous!’ she protested weakly, closing a staying hand over his arm as he shot her yet another murderous smouldering glance before turning back to the door.

Sorry every damn way I know how rang afresh in her ears and tightened her grip on his muscular forearm. ‘Angel, please...let’s calm down.’

‘For what good reason would I calm down?’ Angel raked down at her. ‘This was a pointless attempt on my part to change things between us.’

Her teeth were chattering with nerves. ‘Yes, I can see that but you storming off in a rage is only going to make things worse,’ she muttered ruefully. ‘Maybe I haven’t been fair to you, maybe I haven’t given you a decent hearing, but you came at me with this like a rocket out of nowhere and I don’t adapt quickly to new ideas the way you do!’

‘You adapted fast enough to me in bed!’ Angel husked with sizzling clarity.

‘That’s your massive ego talking!’ Merry launched back at him irately.

‘No, it’s not,’ Angel growled, yanking her up against him, shifting his lithe hips, ensuring she recognised how turned-on he was. ‘You make me want you.’

‘It’s my fault?’ Merry carolled in disbelief even as her whole body tilted into his, as magnetised by his arousal as a thirsty plant suddenly placed within reach of water. Little tremors were running through her as she struggled to get a grip on the prickling tightness of her nipples and the heat building between her thighs. An unbearable ache followed that she positively shrank from reliving in his vicinity. She wanted to slap herself, she wanted to slap him, she wanted to freeze the moment and replay it her way, in which she would draw back from him in withering disgust and say something terribly clever and wounding that would hold him at bay.

‘You just can’t bring yourself to admit that you’re the same,’ Angel gritted, bending his arrogant dark head, one hand meshing into the tumble of her hair to drag her head back and expose her throat. His mouth found that slender corded column and nipped and tasted up to her ear, awakening a shower of tingling sensation, and she was electrified and dizzy with longing, wanting what she knew she shouldn’t, wanting with a hunger suppressed and denied for too many months, craving the release he could give.

And then he kissed her, crushing her ripe mouth, his tongue plunging and retreating, and she saw stars and whirling multicoloured planets behind her lowered lids while her body fizzed like a firework display, leaving her weak with hunger. She kissed him back, hands rising to delve into the crisp luxuriance of his hair, framing, holding, needing. It was frantic, out of control, the way it always was for them.

Angel wrenched her back from him, long brown fingers biting into her slim shoulders to keep her upright and gazing up into his blazing liquid-honey eyes. ‘No, I’m not a one-trick pony or a cheap one-night stand. You’ll have to marry me to get any more of that,’ he told her with derision as he slapped a business card down on the table. ‘My phone number...should you think better of your attitude today.’