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Angel looked up, stung, anger rising. To think that she was going through this humiliation again. ‘How? Was I supposed to just come out with it?’
Leo just glared at her, a muscle popping in his jaw. Angel felt deflated all of a sudden. She backed away. Leo didn’t let her escape his blistering gaze. ‘Dammit, Angel you should have told me.’
He stilled then, and instinctively Angel grew wary. He asked silkily, ‘Did you come back here to sleep with me after discussing your options with your father? Like some kind of sacrificial virgin?’
Horror rose from Angel’s gut. She shook her head. ‘No. No. How could you think such a thing? My father isn’t even here, he’s gone to London.’
Leo raked a hand through his hair, making it flop with unruly sexiness onto his forehead. Angel’s belly clenched even now. She was aware of a pervading sense of hollow disappointment. Evidently he wasn’t willing to sleep with her, to take her innocence. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to be so vulnerable in front of him for a moment longer.
‘I’m going to go back to my room.’
After a long moment Leo just nodded, and said darkly, ‘I think that’s a good idea.’
Leo watched Angel walk out of the room, the gaping dress showing the slender length of her smooth back in a curiously vulnerable way. He felt pole-axed. Winded. She was a virgin. Or was she? He cursed himself. As she’d said herself, it wouldn’t take much to find out, and if he took her now, as he was aching to do, and she was telling the truth…he’d hurt her.
So if she was telling the truth she hadn’t had countless lovers, hadn’t been mistress to other men. It meant that his belief in one aspect of her behaviour had to be amended. For a second he again had the sickening suspicion that this was all part of some plan concocted with her father. Lead him on and drop the bombshell. But then he remembered the look of abject horror mixed with disgust on her face when he’d suggested that. It had been too real to ignore. She’d said her father hadn’t even been there, and that would be easy enough to prove. Something uncomfortable lodged in Leo’s chest.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and dropped his head for a moment. How the hell did someone like her remain a virgin till the age of twenty-four? For some reason he wasn’t prepared to look too closely at why that might be.
He suddenly remembered when they’d been in the study the previous evening. He’d brought her to certain orgasm, or very close. He’d been disgusted to find himself so out of control in that moment. Bringing a fully-clothed woman to orgasm—a woman who had just been caught stealing from his family! At the time he’d dismissed her reaction, not believing it, thinking she was acting. But if her reaction had been genuine it would explain the shocked look on her face, her embarrassment.
Hadn’t he felt compelled to pour her that drink? And then her agitation had led her to knock the glass out of his hand…Leo looked up again at the door she’d just walked through. The certainty hit him that she was telling the truth. You couldn’t fake that kind of innocence.
He was angry—angry with himself for not noticing the signs. He was a connoisseur of women, and yet he’d kissed and held an innocent in his arms and hadn’t even noticed. Because he’d been too inflamed. That was the truth. The minute he came within a foot of Angel his brain started to melt and hormones took over. Out of control. He grimaced. As evidenced by everything leading up to this moment.
When she’d stopped him it had taken more strength than he’d known he possessed to pull back from her lithe, firm body. He’d nearly exploded just seeing her breasts revealed, two beautifully shaped firm mounds, tipped with those small, hard nipples, enticing him to lick and explore.
Already the fire was building in his body again. And something else. The realisation that no other man had discovered the intimate secrets of Angel’s body. A curious bubbling feeling made Leo’s chest expand.
Leo realised that every other man they encountered in Athens might want Angel, but he would know that they hadn’t been her lover… She was a virgin, and she was his. He had the power in his hands to make her uniquely his. Something deeply primitive within him thrilled at the sound of those words, at their implication…
To Angel’s horror, as soon as she stepped under the spray of her shower, weak hot tears started falling down her cheeks, followed by gut-wrenching sobs. She pressed her hands to her face. She couldn’t believe she was feeling this way. She couldn’t believe that Leo, a man she barely knew, was so far under her skin that he had the power to hurt her like this, when she had every reason to hate him. How could she want someone like him to want her? Why wasn’t she happy she’d scored a point? Even she had seen that she’d dented his insufferable confidence for one moment. Stopped him in his tracks…
Angel eventually turned off the shower and stepped out, shivering slightly despite the heat. She roughly towel-dried her hair and pulled on a voluminous robe that was hanging on the back of the door, not even drying herself properly.
She felt flat and empty. Achilles had turned away from her in disgust when he’d discovered her virginity, when he’d known that she couldn’t please him. But Achilles had been a boy. Leo Parnassus was a man. She’d been right to worry; it was so obvious now that he would want nothing to do with a novice.
Angel felt nauseous. Had he been so repulsed? But why else would he have stopped? For a man as virile as him to stop making love just because she was a virgin had to be because he had no interest in being her first lover… Angel couldn’t contemplate for a second that it might have been because she’d genuinely caught him off guard. That there might have been an honourable intention behind it. To indulge in that line of thinking made all sorts of feelings emerge in Angel’s belly; much easier to think of Leo being cruel, single-minded.
She had no idea how things would work now. Perhaps Leo would take lovers on the side while he paraded her in public as his mistress? Angel’s heart constricted. No doubt that might be a further humiliation he’d appreciate when he came to consider it.
But the stark evidence that no man wanted to sleep with her…that Leo didn’t want to sleep with her…sapped her confidence totally—no matter how much she might try and pretend otherwise. Somehow the reason why she was here, the fact that this all stemmed from Leo’s desire for revenge, seemed of little consequence right now.
She stepped out of her bathroom, turning the light off as she did so. For a moment she didn’t notice anyone else in the dimly lit bedroom. Then she heard a muted sound and looked up, suddenly tense.
Leo stood there, just a few feet away, still in his jeans, the top button open, giving a tantalising glimpse of the dark hair which led—Angel gulped. Was she dreaming? Was she so pathetic?
Leo put out a hand. ‘Come here, Angel.’
It was him. On numb legs, trying to ignore the renewed zinging of energy through her veins, Angel walked forward. She stopped a couple of feet away, still needing to protect herself. Just because he was here, it didn’t mean
anything.
But in that moment Leo closed the distance, stepped right up to Angel, took her face in his hands and kissed her. Her mouth opened on a shocked gasp and Leo took devastating advantage, tongue stabbing deep, stroking along hers, until Angel’s legs felt weak and her hands went to Leo’s waist to hold on. It was a sensual onslaught that impacted every cell in her body.
The feel of his hot satiny skin under her hands made them stretch out, trying to feel as much as she could. She couldn’t begin to explain what had just happened; she was only capable of feeling. And, like a coward, she shut out the cacophony of voices in her head.
Eventually Leo pulled back, but not much. With a gesture that was almost tender he stroked Angel’s damp hair behind one ear. And then, his eyes on hers, glittering darkly, he said, ‘You’re mine now, Angel, no one else’s.’
