Immediately Angel bristled. She never talked about her mother to anyone. Not even Delphi. She felt so many conflicting emotions, and yet Leo wasn’t being pushy. Wasn’t cajoling. They were making bizarre late-night conversation. So with a deep breath Angel told him. ‘She left when I was two. She was a beautiful model from Dublin, and I think she found the reality of being married to a Greek man and living a domestic life in Athens too much for her.’
‘She didn’t take you with her?’
Angel fought against flinching. She shook her head. ‘No. I think the reality of a small toddler was also too much for her to bear. She went home, and back to her glamorous jet-setting life. I saw her a couple of times while I was at school in the west of Ireland…but that was it.’
It sounded so pathetic now that Angel told it. Her own mother hadn’t deemed her worth keeping. If it hadn’t been for the birth of the twins, their instantaneous bond, Angel didn’t know how she would have coped.
Leo, seemingly not content with that, asked, ‘What was the school like?’
Angel had the strangest sensation of the earth shifting beneath her feet. She quirked a small smile. ‘It’s in Connemara, one of the most stunning parts of Ireland, but very remote. It’s an old abbey, and it looms across a choppy lake like something out of a Gothic nightmare fantasy. When I went that first September it was raining and grey, and it was just…’ Angel couldn’t help a shudder running through her.
‘A million miles from here?’
Angel nodded, surprised that Leo seemed to understand. ‘Yes.’
Silence fell, and Angel felt awkward. She’d just told Leo more than she’d ever willingly shared with another person. When he got up to put away the jam and peanut butter she felt a question of her own bubbling up inside her. It was something her father had mentioned that fateful night she’d found him with the will. Afraid to ask, but emboldened after what she’d shared with him, as he came back she said, ‘What happened to your mother?’
Leo stopped in his tracks and put his hands on his hips. The temperature in the air around them dropped a few degrees. But Angel was determined not to be intimidated; she was only asking him what he’d asked her.
‘Why do you ask?’ he said sharply.
Angel gulped. She couldn’t lie. ‘Is it true that she committed suicide?’
Leo went even more still. ‘And where did you pick up that nugget of information?’
Angel had to say it, even though she knew that it would damn her to hell for ever in his eyes. ‘The will.’
His body had gone taut, his eyes to obsidian black. No gold. He seemed distant, as if he wasn’t even really aware that Angel was there any more. And then he laughed curtly. ‘The will. Of course. How could I have forgotten? Yes, I do believe that my mother’s suicide is mentioned there—while omitting the gory details, of course.’
Angel wanted to put out a hand and
tell Leo to stop; he was looking at her but not seeing her.
‘I saw her. Everyone thinks to this day that I didn’t see her, but I did. She’d hung herself with a torn sheet from one of the banister railings at the top of the stairs.’
Horror and sorrow filled Angel’s heart. But instinctively she kept quiet.
‘My parents’ marriage was an arranged one. The only problem was that my mother loved my father, but he loved building up the business and reclaiming our home in Greece more than her—or me. My mother couldn’t cope with being sidelined, so she got more and more manipulative, more and more extreme in trying to get his attention. She started with emotional outbursts, but that just turned my father in on himself. The more tears, the less he’d react. Then she started self-harming and claiming that she’d been mugged. When that didn’t work, she took the ultimate step.’
Angel had gone cold inside. What a hideous, hideous thing to have borne. She knew from reading between his words that Leo had seen a lot more than anyone had believed. Not just the suicide. She remembered his reaction to seeing that couple arguing in public, how disgusted he’d looked.
She stood up from the stool. ‘Leo, I…’ She shook her head. What could she say that wasn’t going to sound inept, ridiculous?
Leo finally looked at her properly, as if coming to, and a shiver went down Angel’s spine. She’d no doubt that he’d resent having told her this.
‘“Leo, I…” what?’ he asked, his voice harsh.
Angel stood tall. She knew that he hurt, but it wasn’t her fault. ‘There’s nothing I can say that won’t sound like a worthless platitude…except that I’m sorry you went through that. No child should have to see something so awful.’
Angel’s lack of crocodile tears and her simple yet sincere-sounding statement did something to Leo. It broke something apart inside him. He felt a nameless emotion welling upwards, and knew the only way to push it down would be to find release. A release he’d been denying himself in the belief that he was regaining control, when control was the last thing he seemed to have in his possession.
He was done with denying himself what he wanted and what he needed. But damned if he was going to let Angel know how badly he needed her. She was going to admit her hunger for him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LEO was looking at her so intensely that Angel quivered. And then he just said, in a hard voice, ‘We’re not here to chat and swap life stories, Angel, charming as this has been. I’m done with talking. What I’d like right now is for you to show me what you’ve learnt and seduce me.’
Angel just looked at him, hurt slicing through her at the way he was dismissing what they’d just shared and closing himself off again. She could deduce that he wanted to punish her in some way for having encouraged him to talk, but for her to seduce him? Show him what she’d learnt? She still had no idea what she was doing in bed—no conscious thought anyway. The minute Leo touched her she forgot time and space, everything but the building fire in her body, and now he wanted…