Angel Of Darkness. Lynne Graham

abroad and it must have been almost a year since she had seen him. After that astonishing compliment, she had actually wondered if her stormy relationship with Angelo was miraculously about to improve with his acceptance that she was now an adult.

      She had promised that there would be no alcohol at the party but most of her guests had brought wine. Reluctant to be the odd one out, Kelda had had a couple of glasses. Half a dozen boys had shown up on the doorstep midway through the evening. One of them had been the brother of one of her best friends, so she had let them in.

      It had happened in the library. Some people had drifted in there and she had had to shoo them frantically out again because the party had been getting rowdy and there were far too many valuable objects in that room. She should have called for Angelo’s help then, because she had known that some people had had far too much to drink. But most of those people had been her friends.

      She had been switching out a lamp when she was grabbed from behind. Having believed that she was alone in the room, she had screamed with fright. For a moment, she had assumed it was one of the boys she knew fooling around, but when she was dragged down on the carpet by bruising hands and a crude voice started telling her in the kind of language she had never heard before exactly what he was going to do to a ‘snobby little cow’ like her, she had been terrified out of her wits.

      He had been so strong. Until that night she had never properly appreciated just how much stronger the average male was in comparison to a woman. She had gone wild, trying to kick, trying to claw with her nails while he yanked her dress up round her waist and bit horribly at the exposed slope of her breasts. He had hit her a stunning blow across the side of her head and then he had put his hand over her mouth, depriving her of the ability to scream. She’d been involved in a desperate struggle when the light went on and all of a sudden she was freed.

      She had thrown up on the priceless Persian rug at Angelo’s feet. Her assailant had taken immediate flight. She had not seen his face and, strangely, Angelo had made no attempt to stop him. He had simply swung on his heel and walked back out of the room to tell everyone that the party was over. At that point, she had been too hysterical to realise that Angelo had not understood what he had interrupted.

      Stumbling and crying, she had fled upstairs to her bedroom. She had stripped and got into the shower, needing to wash away the taint of the hands that had touched her. There had been bruises on her breasts and a lump the size of a small egg on the side of her head where she had been struck. The attack had terrified her and she had been sitting still shaking on the side of her bed when Angelo knocked and entered.

      ‘A promiscuous little tramp’, he had called her and, still suffering from the effects of shock, Kelda had looked back at him numbly, unable even to credit that he could think she had been writhing about on the library floor in the dark out of choice.

      ‘He attacked m-me!’ she had gasped. ‘He was trying to rape me...’

      And she still remembered the way Angelo had looked at her. He had been so pale, so rigid with tension. She had recognised the seething anger he was struggling to restrain. It had glittered dangerously in his piercing dark eyes like a violent storm warning. For a foolish moment she had actually thought that he believed her and that he was angry with himself, angry that he had allowed her assailant to get away instead of calling the police to report an assault. But his next words had demolished that hope.

      ‘You disgust me,’ he had breathed in a savage undertone. ‘I will never forget what I saw tonight.’

      He had not even given her a fair hearing, had not hesitated in choosing to believe the very worst of her. His response, following so closely upon the attack she had endured had reduced her to stricken sobs. It had been some time before she pulled herself together again, and then the anger and the fear of what he would tell her mother and Tomaso had assailed her.

      She hadn’t thought about what she did next. Had she known what would happen, she would have stayed where she was, safe in her own room...but she had been distressed and frightened and helplessly determined that Angelo should hear her side of the story and believe her. She hadn’t stopped even to put her dressing-gown on.

      She had knocked on Angelo’s door. Although she had been able to see faint light beneath the door, there had been no answer. She had crept in. The bedside lamp had cast a soft pool of light over Angelo. He had been asleep and about that point, her memory became confused between what she did recall and what, for a long time afterwards, she had refused to admit even to herself.

      A white sheet had been riding dangerously low on one lean golden hip. He had been naked and she had been strangely hesitant about waking him. Indeed now, when she was of an age when she had learnt to be truthful at least with herself, she could admit that she had been mesmerised by his sheer masculine beauty. For the very first time, she had reacted to Angelo’s physical allure. He had not been Tomaso’s son, her hatefully arrogant stepbrother, who just so happened to be very good-looking. No, it had been much more personal, much more intimate than that, and the sensations Angelo had aroused in her had been painfully new to her experience.

      He had opened his eyes, pools of passionate gold. He had not appeared to be still half asleep. But perhaps he had been. Something had flamed in that golden gaze that raked over her while she had hovered there in stupid paralysis and he had reached up with two very determined hands and pulled her down on to that bed with him.

      ‘Carissima...bella mia,’ he had breathed passionately against her lips in welcome, suggesting that he had inexplicably mistaken her for someone else. He could not possibly have been addressing those endearments to Kelda.

      ‘Angelo!’ she had gasped incredulously before he silenced her with the heat of his mouth.

      It had not been to her credit that she had neither screamed nor raised a finger to fight him off. But the terrible truth was that she had had no thought of denying him. In fact she could not recall a single thought of anything passing through her blitzed mind during those fevered few minutes.

      The explosion of desire, of need, of want had been instantaneous. The stab of his tongue into the moist interior of her mouth had drowned her in waves of intense physical pleasure. She had been reduced to mindless compliance within seconds. Angelo kissed with electrifying eroticism. She had wrapped her arms round him with shameless abandonment and the spell had only been broken when a thunderous male voice rudely interrupted them.

      ‘You set me up!’ Angelo had hissed incomprehensibly, staring down at her with cold, embittered fury.

      Even six years after the event, Kelda still got hot and cold reliving that hideous moment when Angelo had released her and she had dazedly focused on Tomaso standing at the foot of the bed. Ignoring her, Tomaso had been ranting at his son in staccato Italian. Normally a mild-mannered man, Angelo’s father had been shocked and completely enraged by the scene he had interrupted.

      But then, oddly enough, Tomaso had briefly appeared to calm down. He had even managed a rather grim smile as he said something very clipped. Whatever Angelo had said in response had wiped that smile right back off his face again and two seconds later Tomaso had been ripping off his own jacket, draping it round Kelda’s cowering shoulders and practically trailing her out of the room while throwing words that had sounded positively violent over his shoulder at his son. His precious, much beloved son...

      Daisy had come to her bedroom. Kelda had striven to explain the inexplicable but tears had overwhelmed her. ‘Just put it behind you, darling,’ her mother had whispered, in sympathetic tears herself. ‘I know you must feel very foolish but at your age one does do foolish things...that’s a fact of life...and it’s so hard to control your feelings but you’ll get over him...’

      Her mother had assumed that she had thrown herself at Angelo’s head because she was infatuated with him, and Kelda had been too deeply ashamed of her behaviour and too desperately confused to protest. She hated Angelo and yet when he had touched her she had gone up in flames. It had not been the sort of self-discovery she could have shared with her mother.

      Angelo had read her appearance by the side of his bed as a sexual invitation. Why he should have done so and why he should have