Married to a Mistress(24)

With a sudden shift of his hips, Angelos withdrew from her again. But he kept on staring down at her in the most mortifying way, his bewilderment blatant. A damp sheen accentuated the tautness of the bronzed skin stretched over his hard cheekbones and the pallor spreading beneath. ‘Cristo...a virgin...’ he breathed, not quite levelly.

Maxie lay there, feeling horribly rejected and inadequate and wishing she could vanish.

‘And I really hurt you,’ Angelos groaned even more raggedly, abruptly levering his weight from her, black eyes holding hers with the same transfixed incredulity with which he might have regarded the sudden descent of an alien spaceship in his bedroom. ‘Are you in a lot of pain?’

In one driven movement Maxie rolled off the bed and fled in the direction of the bathroom. Dear heaven, he had been so repulsed he had just abandoned their lovemaking.

‘Maxie?’ Angelos murmured grimly. ‘I think this is something we definitely need to talk about—’

Maxie slammed the bathroom door so loudly it rocked on its hinges and then she depressed the lock double-quick. Bang went the image of the cool sophisticate! And without that glossy image she felt naked and exposed. The last thing she could’ve faced right then was awkward questions. And as she turned on the bath taps she recalled his swinging verbal attack on her before they made love and she burst into gulping tears.

Angelos banged on the door. ‘Maxie? Come out of there!’

‘Go to hell!’ she shouted, cramming her hand to her wobbling mouth before a sob could escape and betray her.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m having a bath, Angelos...not drowning myself! Although with that technique of yours, I understand your concern!’

But no sooner had Maxie hurled those nasty words than she was thoroughly ashamed of herself. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, he hadn’t known, and lashing out in retaliation because she felt horribly humiliated was unjust and mean. Silence fell. Slowly, miserably, Maxie climbed into the bath.

Only then did it occur to her that it was foolish to be distressed by what Angelos had said in temper earlier. After all, he had now discovered that she could not possibly have been Leland’s mistress. So that had to make a difference to the light in which he saw her, surely? Only what she had been given with one hand had seemingly been taken with the other. Angelos had been repulsed by her inexperience.

Devastated by that awareness, Maxie thought back seven months to that single exchanged glance with Angelos across that long table in the Petronides boardroom, that charged clash of mutual awareness which seemed to have changed her entire life. Angelos had actually been waiting for her to ditch Leland on his behalf and he had been furious when she hadn’t.

Furthermore, Angelos could not now bring himself to speak Leland Coulter’s name out loud. In fact he had said she would offend him beyond belief with any reference to Leland before they’d even got into bed. Yet Angelos had been in no way that sensitive to that former relationship when he’d first come to announce his intentions at Liz’s house... Men were strange, Maxie decided limply, and none more strange than Angelos.

It took her a long time to emerge from the bathroom, but when she did, wrapped in an over-large short silk robe she had found, the bedroom was empty. It was something of an anticlimax. Maxie got back into bed, not remotely sleepy and very tense, while she waited and waited for Angelos to reappear. A postmortem to end all postmortems now threatened. Having emerged from shock, Angelos would take refuge in anger, she forecast glumly. He would demand to know why she hadn’t told him the truth about Leland. He would utterly dismiss any claim that he would never have believed her.

She lay back, steeling herself for recriminations as only Angelos could hurl them. Like deadly weapons which struck a bull’s-eye every time. He never missed. And she hadn’t been fair to him; she knew now that she hadn’t been fair. Liz had been right. She had reaped a twisted kind of relish out of pretending to be something she wasn’t while she goaded Angelos on and taunted him. And so why had she reacted to him in a way she had never reacted to any other man? Maxie discovered that she was miserable enough without forcing herself to answer that question.

The door opened. She braced herself. Angelos stood poised in the doorway. Barefoot, black hair tousled, strong jawline already darkening with stubble, he looked distinctly unfamiliar in a pair of black tight-fitting jeans, with a black shirt hanging loose and unbuttoned on his bare brown hair-roughened chest.

‘I now know everything...’ he announced in the most peculiar slurred drawl. ‘But I am too bloody drunk to fly!’

Maxie sat up. Eyes huge, she watched Angelos collide with the door and glower at it as if it had no business being there in his path. He was drunk all right. And he just looked so helpless to Maxie at that moment that she abandoned her stony, defensive aspect. Concern for him took over instead.

Leaping out of bed and crossing the room, she put her hand on his arm. ‘Come and lie down,’ she urged.

‘Not on that bed.’ As he swayed Angelos surveyed the divan with an extraordinary force of antagonism. ‘Right at this moment I want to burn it.’

Assuming that her vindictive comment on his technique had struck home with greater force and efficacy than she could ever have imagined, Maxie paled with guilt but continued to try and ease him in the same direction. Was that why he had gone off to hit the bottle? Some intrinsically male sense of sexual failure because he had inadvertently hurt her? Maxie endeavoured to drag him across the carpet. He was obstinate as ever.

‘Lie down!’ she finally launched at him in full-throttle frustration.

And Angelos did lie down. Maxie couldn’t believe it but he sprawled down on the bed as if she had a gun trained on him. And he looked so utterly miserable. It was true, she decided in fascination, women were definitely the stronger sex. Here was the evidence. Disaster had befallen Angelos when he had least expected it in a field he prided himself on excelling in and he couldn’t handle it.

Crawling onto the bed beside him, Maxie gazed down at him until her eyes misted over. She was shattered to discover that all she wanted to do was cocoon him in lashings of TLC.

‘You were really great until the last moment,’ she told him in tender consolation. ‘I didn’t mean what I said. You mustn’t blame yourself—’

‘I blame Leland,’ Angelos gritted.

In complete confusion, Maxie frowned. ‘You blame... you blame Leland?’ she stressed, all at seas as to his meaning.

Angelos growled something in Greek that broke from him with the aggressive force of a hurricane warning.

‘English, Angelos...’

‘He’s a slime-bag!’

Focusing on her properly for the first time, Angelos dug a hand into the pocket of his jeans and withdrew a great wodge of crumpled fax paper.

Maxie took it from him and spread the paper out. It was so long it kept on spreading, across his chest and finally right off the edge of the bed. She squinted down and recognised her own signature right at the very foot. In such dim light, it left her little the wiser as to its content, and in his presence she didn’t want to be seen peering to comprehend all that tiny type.

‘Leland took advantage of your stupidity—’

‘Excuse me?’ Maxie cut in, wide-eyed.

‘Only a financially very naive person would’ve signed that loan contract,’ Angelos extended, after a long pause during which he had visibly struggled to come up with that more diplomatic term. ‘And a moneylender from a backstreet would’ve offered more generous terms than that evil old bastard!’

Clarity shone at last for Maxie. Angelos had somehow obtained a copy of the loan agreement she had signed three years earlier. That was what was on the fax paper. ‘Where did you get this from?’

‘I got it,’ Angelos responded flatly.

‘Why did you say I was stupid...? Because I’m not!’

‘You’d still have been paying that loan off ten years from now.’ He got technical then, muttering grimly about criminal rates of interest and penalty clauses. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she had become trapped in such an agreement because she had been too proud to ask someone else to read the small print out and explain the conditions.

‘You were only nineteen,’ Angelos grated finally. ‘You signed that the day before you moved in with Leland. He blackmailed you—’

‘No...I agreed. There was never any question of us sharing a bedroom or anything like that. All he ever asked for was the right to show me off. I was just an ego-trip for him but I didn’t know what I was getting into until it was too late to back out,’ Maxie muttered tightly, squashing the fax paper into a big crunched-up ball again and throwing it away.

‘And Leland was getting his own back on an unfaithful wife,’ Angelos completed grimly.

Unsurprised that he should have known about Jennifer Coulter’s affair, Maxie breathed in deep and decided to match his frankness. ‘My father is a compulsive gambler, Angelos. He got into trouble with some very tough men and he couldn’t pay up what he owed them. It was nothing to do with Leland. but I went to him for advice, and that’s when he told me he’d loan me the money if I moved in with him.’