Strongly reassured by that unexpectedly emotional speech, Maxie gazed wordlessly up at him. Angelos breathed in deep and drew back from her. Black eyes meeting her bemused scrutiny, he murmured tautly, ‘I have so much I want to say to you...but there is someone waiting to see you and it would be cruel to keep him waiting any longer. Your father is already very nervous of his reception.’
‘My...my father?’ Maxie whispered shakily. ‘He’s here?’
‘I put private detectives on his trail and they contacted me as soon as they found him. I went to see him yesterday. I had planned to bring him back to the apartment to surprise you.’ Angelos guided her over to one of the comfortable armchairs and settled her down carefully, seeming to recognise that she was in need of that assistance. ‘I’ll send him in...’
Stiff with strain, Maxie breathed unevenly, ‘Just tell me one thing before you go...has Dad asked you for money?’
‘No. No, he hasn’t. He’s cleaned up his act, Maxie. He’s holding down a job and trying to make a decent life for himself.’ Angelos shrugged. ‘But he would be the first one to admit that he still has to fight the temptation to go back to his old habits.’
Her troubled eyes misted with tears. As Russ Kendall stepped uncertainly through the door through which Angelos had just departed, Maxie slid upright. Her father looked older, his hair greyer, and he had put on weight. He also looked very uncertain of himself.
‘I wasn’t sure about coming here after what I did,’ her father admitted uncomfortably. ‘It’s very hard for me to face you now. I let you down the whole time I was bringing you -up but I let you down worst of all three years ago, when I left you to pay the price for my stupidity.’
Maxie’s stiffness gave way. Closing the distance between them, she gave the older man a comforting hug. ‘You loved me. I always knew that. It made up for a lot,’ she told him frankly. ‘You did the best you could.’
‘I hit rock-bottom when I saw you having to dance to the tune of that old coot, Leland Coulter.’ Russ Kendall shook his head with bitter regret. ‘There was no way I could avoid facing up to how low I’d sunk and how much I’d dragged you down. I leeched off you, off everyone. All I lived for was the next game, the next bet—’
Maxie drew him up short there. ‘Angelos says you’ve got a job. Tell me about that,’ she encouraged.
For the past year he had been working as a salesman for a northern confectionery firm. It was now eighteen months since he had last laid a bet. He still attended weekly meetings with other former gamblers.
Maxie told him that the cottage no longer had a sitting tenant. Her father frowned in surprise, and then slowly he smiled. Rather apprehensively, he then admitted that he had met someone he was hoping to marry. He would sell the cottage and put the proceeds towards buying a house. Myrtle, he explained, had some savings of her own, and it was a matter of pride that he should not bring less to the relationship.
Now he was middle-aged, she registered, her father finally wanted the ordinary things that other people wanted. Security, self-respect, to be loved, appreciated. And wasn’t that exactly what she had always wanted for herself? Her father had needed her forgiveness and she had needed to shed her bitter memories. As they talked, her gratitude to Angelos for engineering such a reconciliation steadily increased. Russ had built a new life and she wished him well with her whole heart.
‘You’ve got yourself a good bloke in Angelos,’ her father commented with a nod as he took his leave. ‘I shouldn’t like to cross him, though.’
Maxie was mopping her eyes when Angelos reappeared. She didn’t look at him. ‘This has been a heck of morning... but I’m really grateful that you found Dad for me. It’s like a whole big load of worry has dropped off my shoulders. Tell me, would you have brought us together again if he’d still been down on the skids?’
From the corner of her eye, she saw Angelos still. ‘Not immediately,’ he confessed honestly. ‘I would have tried to get him some help first. But be wouldn’t have come if he hadn’t sorted himself out. He wouldn’t have had the courage to face you.’
Angelos curved a supportive hand round her spine and walked her towards the door. ‘We have a helicopter to catch.’
‘Where on earth are we going?’
‘Surprise...’
‘I thought Dad was my surprise.’
‘Only part of it.’ He urged her up a flight of stairs and they emerged onto the roof, where a helicopter waited. Maxie grimaced and gave him a look of reproach which he pretended not to notice.
He held her hand throughout the flight. Maxie was forced to admit that it wasn’t so bad. She was even persuaded to look out of the windows once or twice. But she still closed her eyes and prayed when they started coming in to land. Angelos restored her to solid ground again with careful hands. ‘You’re doing really great,’ he told her admiringly.
Only then did Maxie open her eyes. She gaped. A hundred yards away stood a very large and imposing nineteenth-century country house surrounded by a gleaming sea of luxury cars. Three other helicopters were parked nearby. ‘Where are we? What’s going on?’
‘I did once mention having a house in the country but you were ill at the time,’ Angelos conceded with a wolfish smile. ‘Welcome to the wedding reception you never had, Mrs Petronides...’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Maxie prompted unevenly.
‘All my relatives and all my friends are waiting to meet you,’ Angelos revealed. ‘And the advantage of inviting them for lunch is that they all have to go home before dinner. Two weeks ago, the only reason I agreed to hold fire on announcing our marriage was that I hadn’t the slightest desire to share you with other people. I wanted you all to myself for a while—’
‘All your relatives...all your friends?’
‘Maxie...this little celebration has been in the pipeline for two weeks. The invitations went out while we were in Greece.’ He hesitated and cast her a rueful glance. ‘I did ask your father to join us but he preferred not to.’
Maxie nodded without surprise and wondered absently why they were dawdling so much on their passage towards the house. ‘Was Dad the something that came up yesterday?’
‘I went up to Manchester to see him. That took up quite a few hours and then I came back here for the night. I wanted to check everything was ready for us.’ Angelos stilled her steps altogether, casting an odd, frustrated glance of expectancy up at the sky.
‘What’s wrong...?’
The whine of an aircraft approaching brought a smile back to Angelos’s impatient dark features. As a low-flying plane approached over the trees, he banded both arms round Maxie and turned her round. ‘Look up,’ he urged.
Maxie’s eyes widened. In the wake of the strange trail of pink smoke left by the plane, words appeared to be forming.
‘That’s an I,’ Angelos informed her helpfully. ‘And that’s an L and an O and a V—’
‘Even I can read letters that big!’ Maxie snapped.
The words ‘I love you’ stood there in the sky, picked out in bright pink. Maxie’s jaw dropped.
Somewhat pained by this lack of response, Angelos breathed, ‘I wanted you to know that I am proud of my feelings for you...and it was the only way I could think of doing it.’
Never in Maxie’s wildest dreams would it have occurred to her that Angelos would do something so public and so deeply uncool. ‘You love me?’ she whispered weakly.
‘You ought to know that by now!’ Angelos launched in frustration. ‘I’ve been tying myself in knots for weeks trying to show you how much I care!’
Maxie surveyed him with eyes brimming with happiness, but was conscious of a very slight sense of female incomprehension. ‘Angelos...couldn’t you just say the words?’
‘You weren’t ready to hear them. You had a very low opinion of me...and, let me tell you, few men would’ve emerged from reading that written character assassination of yours with much in the way of hope!’ Angelos asserted with a feeling shudder.
Maxie was aghast. ‘You found my list—?’
‘How could you write all those things about me?’
‘There was no name on it, so if you recognised the traits...’ Maxie fell silent and studied him with dismayed and sympathetic eyes. ‘Oh, Angelos...you kept quiet all this time, and that must’ve killed you—’
‘I used that list as a blueprint for persuading you that I wasn’t the man you imagined I was.’
‘And you improved so much,’ Maxie completed rather tactlessly.
With a helpless groan, Angelos hauled her close and kissed her with devouring passion. Maxie’s impressionable heart went crazy. She submitted to being crushed with alacrity and hugged him tight, finally resting her golden head down on his broad shoulder as she struggled to catch her breath again. ‘Oh, dear, I was the tart who thought you were great in bed and that was all...you were playing games with me when you said that, Angelos!’ she condemned.
‘That is really rich...coming from a wife who announced she preferred to be a mistress—’