Charles raised a dubious brow. ‘You think so? Seems to be a lot of sweat and effort to go to for a man she refuses to see.’
‘She had the neck to tell my lawyer that she couldn’t allow me to visit without risking breaching the non-disclosure agreement!’ Angel growled.
‘There could be grounds for that concern,’ his father remarked thoughtfully. ‘The paparazzi do follow you around and you visiting her would put a spotlight on her and the child.’
Angel drew himself up to his full six feet four inches and squared his wide shoulders. ‘I would be discreet.’
‘Sadly, it’s a little late in the day to be fighting over parental access. You should have considered that first and foremost in your dealings because unmarried fathers have few, if any, rights under British law—’
‘Are you suggesting that I marry her?’ Angel demanded with incredulity.
‘No.’ Charles shook his greying head to emphasise that negative. ‘That sort of gesture has to come from the heart.’
‘Or the brain,’ Angel qualified. ‘I could marry her, take her out to Greece and then fight her there for custody, where I would have an advantage. That option was suggested at one point by my legal team.’
Charles regarded his unapologetically ruthless son with concealed apprehension because it had never been his intention to exacerbate the situation between his son and the mother of his child. ‘I would hope that you would not even consider sinking to that level of deceit. Surely a more enlightened arrangement is still possible?’
But was it? Angel was not convinced even while he assured his concerned father that he would sort the situation out without descending to the level of dirty tricks. But was an access agreement even achievable?
After all, how could he be sure of anything in that line? Merry Armstrong had foiled him, blocked him and denied him while subjecting him to a raft of outrageous arguments rather than simply giving him what he wanted. Angel was wholly unaccustomed to such disrespectful treatment. Every time she knocked him back he was stunned by the unfamiliarity of the experience.
All his life he had pretty much got what he wanted from a woman whenever he wanted it. Women, usually, adored him. Women from his mother to his aunts to his cousins and those in his bed worshipped him like a god. Women lived to please Angel, flatter him, satisfy him: it had always been that way in Angel’s gilded world of comfort and pleasure. And Angel had taken that enjoyable reality entirely for granted until the very dark day he had chosen to tangle with Merry Armstrong…
He had noticed her immediately, the long glossy mane of dark mahogany hair clipped in a ponytail that reached almost to her waist, the pale crystalline blue eyes and the pink voluptuous mouth that sang of sin to a sexually imaginative male. Throw in the lean, leggy lines of a greyhound and proximity and their collision course had been inevitable from day one in spite of the fact that he had never before slept with one of his employees and had always sworn not to do so.
* * *
Merry’s fingers closed shakily over the letter that the postman had just delivered. A tatty sausage-shaped Yorkshire terrier gambolled noisily round her feet, still overexcited by the sound of the doorbell and another voice.
‘Quiet, Tiger,’ Merry murmured firmly, mindful that fostering the little dog was aimed at making him a suitable adoptee for a new owner. But even as she thought that, she knew she had broken her aunt Sybil’s strict rules with Tiger by getting attached and by letting him sneak onto her sofa and up onto her lap. Sybil adored dogs but she didn’t believe in humanising or coddling them. It crossed Merry’s mind that perhaps she was as emotionally damaged as Tiger had been by abuse. Tiger craved food as comfort; Merry craved the cosiness of a doggy cuddle. Or was she kidding herself in equating the humiliation she had suffered at Angel’s hands with abuse? Making a mountain out of a molehill, as Sybil had once briskly told her?
Sadly the proof of that pudding was in the eating as she flipped over the envelope and read the London postmark with a stomach that divebombed in sick dismay. It was another legal letter and she couldn’t face it. With a shudder of revulsion laced with fear she cravenly thrust the envelope in the drawer of the battered hall table, where it could stay until she felt able to deal with it…calmly.