CHAPTER EIGHT
MERRY AND ANGEL lay side by side in the orange grove above the private beach. Day after day had melted into the next with a curiously timeless quality that had gradually teased all the tension from Merry’s bones and taught her how to relax. She could hardly credit that they had already spent an entire month on the island. Her body ached from his demands, not that she wasn’t willing, but she was still in shock at the extent of Angel’s ravenous hunger for her.
It was sex, only sex, she told herself regularly, and then in the dark of the night when Angel wasn’t his sardonic know-all self she snuggled up to him, revelling in the intimacy that now bonded them. Maintaining a controlled distance wasn’t possible with a man as unashamedly physical as the one she had married. Angel had no limits. He would go and work for a couple of hours in his home office and then sweep down on her wherever she was and cart her off to bed again as if he had been parted from her for at least a month.
‘I missed you,’ he would say, replete with satisfaction while her pulses still pounded and her body hummed in the aftermath.
‘I could work with you,’ she would say.
‘You’re my wife, the mother of my child, no longer an employee.’
‘I could be a junior partner,’ she had proffered pathetically.
‘We can’t live in each other’s pockets twenty-four-seven,’ Angel had pointed out drily. ‘It would be unhealthy.’
No, what Merry sometimes thought was unhealthy was the sheer weight of love that Angel now inspired in her. That was a truth she had evaded as long as possible: she loved him.
Only because she loved him and her daughter had she been willing to give Angel one last chance, she acknowledged ruefully. There were still a thousand things she wanted to punish him for, but she knew that vengeful, bitter thoughts were unproductive and would ultimately damage any hope of their having a stable relationship. In that line, she was sensible, very sensible, she acknowledged ruefully. Unfortunately, she only became stupid when it came to Angel himself.
Sometimes she had to work uncomfortably hard to hide her love. She would see him laughing over Elyssa’s antics in the bath, amusement lightening and softening his lean, darkly handsome features, and she wouldn’t be able to drag her eyes from him. He had taken her down to the village taverna above the harbour and dined with her there, introducing her to the locals, more relaxed than she had ever seen him in company, his usually razor-edged cynicism absent. He had tipped her out of bed to climb the highest hill on the island to see in the dawn and told her off for moaning about how tired she was even though he had drained her energy at the summit with al fresco sex. But of course she was tired, making love half the night and half the day, physically active in all the hours between as she strove to match his high-voltage energy levels.
Ironically, complete peace had engulfed the Valtinos house the day after the wedding once Angel had revealed that his mother and her boyfriend had departed at dawn for an unknown destination, leaving the other half of the house in a fine mess for the staff to deal with. Merry had felt relieved and then guilty at feeling relieved because, like it or not, Angel’s challenging and difficult mother was family and had to somehow be integrated into their lives or become a continuing problem.
They had gone sailing on the yacht, visiting other islands, shopping, picnicking. They had thrown a giant party at the house attended by all Angel’s relatives, near and distant. She had met his second cousin who lived in London and had heard all about Angel’s visit to her home before he first met Elyssa, and Merry had laughed like a drain when she’d recognised how wily he had been to find out a little more about babies before he’d served himself up as a new father to one.
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked drowsily.
‘I’m not a girl. I don’t have a favourite,’ Angel parried with amusement.
‘Birth sign?’
‘Look at your marriage certificate, lazy-bones,’ he advised. ‘I’m a Scorpio, but I don’t believe in that sh—’
‘Language,’ she reminded him, resting a finger against his parted lips.