‘Lamb to the slaughter,’ Angelos groaned, as if he was in agony. ‘Compulsive gambler?’ he queried in sudden bemusement.
‘Dad would sell this bed out from under you if he got the chance.’
‘Where have you kept this charming character concealed?’
‘I don’t know where he is right now. We haven’t been close...well, not since I took on that loan to settle his debts. Naturally Dad feels bad about that.’
‘The debt was his?’ Angelos bit out wrathfully as that fact finally sunk in. ‘Your precious father stood back and watched you move in with Leland just so that he could have his gambling debts paid?’
‘It was life or death, Angelos...it really was,’ Maxie protested. ‘He’d already been badly beaten up and he was terrified they would kill him the next time around. Leland gave me that money when nobody else would have. It saved Dad’s life.’
‘Dad doesn’t sound like he was worth saving—’
‘Don’t you dare say that about my father!’ Maxie censured chokily. ‘He brought me up all on his own!’
‘Taught you how to go to the pawnshop? Flogged anything he could get his hands on? Your childhood must’ve been a real blissfest, I don’t think!’
‘He did his best. That’s all anyone can do,’ Maxie whispered tautly. ‘Not everyone is born with your advantages in life. You’re rich and selfish. Dad’s poor and selfish, but, unfortunately for him, he has too much imagination.’
‘So have I...oh, so have I. I imagined you,’ Angelos confided, his deep dark drawl slurring with intense bitterness. ‘The only quality I imagined right was that you do need me. But all the rest was my fantasy. Tonight... deservedly...it exploded right in my face.’
Maxie slumped as if he had beaten the stuffing out of her. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t need him but her throat was so clogged up with tears she couldn’t trust herself to speak. A fantasy? He had imagined her? That was even worse than being a one-dimensional trophy, she realised in horror. At the end of the day, when fantasy met reality and went bang, there was just nothing left, was there?
‘I don’t want to sober up,’ Angelos admitted morosely. ‘The more I find out about you, the worse I feel. I don’t like regret or guilt. Some people love to immolate themselves in their mistakes. I don’t. How could I have been so bloody stupid?’
‘Sex,’ Maxie supplied, even more morosely.
Angelos shuddered. It was a very informative reaction.
‘Was it that bad?’ she couldn’t help asking.
‘Worse,’ Angelos stressed feelingly. ‘I felt like a rapist.’
‘Silly...just bad luck...life kicking you in the teeth...you get used to it after a while...least, I do,’ Maxie mumbled, on the brink of tears again.
‘You should be furious with me—’
‘No point...you’re drunk. I like you better drunk than I like you sober,’ she confided helplessly. ‘You’re more human.’
‘Christos...when you go for the deathblow, you don’t miss, do you?’ Unhealthily pale beneath his bronzed skin, Angelos let his tousled head fall heavily back on the pillows. His lashes swept down on his shadowed black eyes. ‘So now I know where I stand with you...basement footing—possibly even right down level with the earth’s core,’ he muttered incomprehensibly.
‘Go to sleep,’ Maxie urged.
‘When one is that far down, one can only go up,’ Angelos asserted with dogged resolution.
Well, at least he wasn’t talking about flying again. With a helicopter parked thirty yards away that had been a genuine cause for concern. She ought to hate him. She knew she ought to hate him for breaking her heart with such agonising honesty. But the trouble was, she loved him in spite of that two-page list of flaws. She didn’t know why she loved him. She just did. And she was in really deep too. He had just rejected her in every possible way and all she wanted to do was cover him up and hug him to death. Flaked out, silenced and vulnerable, Angelos had huge appeal for Maxie.
Why had she spent so long telling herself that she hated this guy? She had been cleverer than she knew, she conceded. Loving him hurt like hell. She felt as if she had lost an entire layer of skin and every inch of her was now tender and wounded. There she had been, naively imagining that he might have been upset because his sexual performance had not resulted in her impressed-to-death ecstasy. And all the time he had been ahead of her, whole streets ahead of her...
The minute he had found out that he was her first lover, he had fairly leapt into seeking out what her relationship with Leland had been based on, since it had self-evidently not been based on sex. Naturally he had immediately thought of that loan and probed deeper. And now he knew the whole sorry story and her name had been cleared. But much good it seemed to have done her...
Liz had said Maxie enjoyed pretending to be what she had called a ‘bad girl’. Maxie suppressed a humourless laugh. Poor Liz had never allowed for the painful possibility that Angelos, who had exceedingly poor taste in women, was more excited by bad girls than he was by virgins.
CHAPTER NINE
MAXIE wakened the next morning in the warm cocoon of Angelos’s arms. It felt like heaven.
Some time during the night he had taken off his shirt. She opened her lips languorously against a bare brown shoulder and let the tip of her tongue gently run over smooth skin. He tasted wonderful. She breathed in the achingly familiar scent of him with heady pleasure. Hot husky male with a slight flavour of soap. She blushed for herself, but the deep, even rise and fall of his broad chest below her encircling arm soothed her sudden tension. He was still out for the count.
And she would probably never lie like this with Angelos again. He was only here now because he had fallen asleep. She had plummeted from the heights of obsessive desirability like a stone. She had lost him but then she had never really had him. He had craved the fantasy, the Ice Queen, not the ordinary woman, and when in so many ways she had played up to that fantasy of his, how could she really blame him for not wanting her any more?
Easing back her arm, she let her palm rest down on that hair-roughened expanse of chest which drew her attention like a magnet. Her fingertips trailed gently through black springy curls, delicately traced a flat male nipple, slid downward over the rippling muscular smoothness of his abdomen, discovering a fascinating little furrow of silky hair that ran...and then she tensed in panic as she recognised the alteration in his breathing pattern. She was waking him up!
And just at that moment Maxie didn’t feel strong enough to face Angelos waking up, sober and restored to intimidating normality. Angelos would bounce back from last night’s shock and humility like a rubber ball aiming for the moon. Lying absolutely still, she waited until his breathing had evened out again and then, sidling out from under his arm, she slid off the bed.
Gathering up her discarded garments, she crept out into the corridor. Through the open doorway of the bedroom opposite she could see her single suitcase sitting at the foot of the bed. And that sight just underlined Maxie’s opinion of her exact marital status. She had no status whatsoever. Her possessions belonged in a guest-room because she was supposed to be a casual visitor, not a wife.
Pulling out a white shift dress, fresh lingerie and strappy sandals, Maxie got dressed at speed. It was only seven but the heat was already building. The house was silent. Finding her way into a vast, gleaming kitchen, she helped herself to a glass of pure orange juice and swiped a couple of apples from a lush display of fruit. Determined not to face Angelos until she had sorted herself out, she left the house. Traversing the beautiful gardens, she wandered along the rough path above the beach.
Then she let her thoughts loose, and she winced and she squirmed and she hurt. Their wedding night had been a disaster. And how much of that final confessional dialogue would Angelos recall when he woke up? Would he remember the stupid, soppy way she had hung over him? Would he recognise the pain she had not been able to conceal for what it was? The mere idea that Angelos might guess that she was in love with him was like the threat of death by a thousand cuts for Maxie.
Last night, for the very first time, Angelos hadn’t treated her as an equal. Maxie shrank from that lowering awareness. Funny how she hadn’t really noticed or even appreciated that Angelos had always met her on a level playing field until he suddenly changed tack. Now everything was different. She had been stripped of her tough cookie glossy image and exposed as a pathetic fraud. A virgin rather than a sultry, seductive object of must-have desire. A blackmail victim rather than a calculating gold-digger and the former mistress of an older man.
And who would ever have guessed that Angelos Petronides had a conscience? But, amazingly, he did. Angelos had been appalled by what he’d discovered. Even worse, he had pitied her for her less than perfect childhood and her gullible acceptance of that hateful loan agreement. Pitied. That acknowledgement was coals of fire on Maxie’s head.
Angelos now regretted their strange marriage but he felt guilty. Maxie didn’t want his guilt or his pity, and suddenly she saw how she could eradicate both. It would be so simple. All she had to do was tell Angelos about the conditions of Nancy Leeward’s last will and testament. When Angelos realised that she had had an ulterior motive in marrying him, he would soon stop feeling sorry for her...at least she would retain her pride that way.