A Secret Seduction: A Secret Until Now / A Sinful Seduction / Secrets of a Shy Socialite. Elizabeth Lane
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walk you back to your bungalow.’
A cold fist of fear tightened in her belly as Angel realised that she wanted to say yes. When she recognised how much she wanted to say yes the fist tightened even more.
She tossed back her hair and made her voice cold. ‘That will be quite unnecessary and I’m not going back to my bungalow. I’m going back to the party.’ A room full of people no longer seemed a bad thing; she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts.
‘If it makes you feel any better, Emma, my wife, died several weeks before we slept together.’
The words stopped her in her tracks. She shook her head. Was she being slow...? ‘You expect that to make me feel better?’
He had, but it was fairly obvious he had been wrong. ‘I thought you had a right to know.’ The comment had not sounded so lame or pompous in his head.
‘But not before I spent six years worrying that I’d turned into my mother. Why on earth did you say you were married?’
‘I didn’t say, you assumed.’
‘And you didn’t put me right. Why... Oh, you... Oh...’ Comprehension flickered into her eyes. ‘It was the quickest way to get rid of me...?’
‘I have a distaste of scenes.’
She sucked in a deep breath through flared nostrils. Hearing the beat of helicopter blades somewhere in the distance she could only hope that they were here to whisk him away. ‘I’m going back into the party—your party, so I can’t stop you coming too, but if you pester me so help me I’ll report you to the hotel management for harassment and I don’t care who it upsets!’
Not him, if his expression was any indicator. ‘I can speak for the management when I say that we take all complaints very seriously.’
‘We?’ She shook her head. ‘This hotel is part of the Theakis group.’ Her frown deepened as his firm lips twitched. ‘What is so funny? Don’t you believe I would?’
‘Oh, I believe you would follow through with any rash threat you make. But before you do I should explain that my grandfather was Spyros Theakis, Angelina. I am the Theakis group and speaking in that role I can assure you we take all such complaints very seriously.’
The realisation hit Angel like a stone. Having deflated her, he strode off in the opposite direction without another word or backwards glance.
ANGEL STAYED AT the party for another hour but by the time she reached her room her headache had become a full-blown migraine. At least it meant she wasn’t going to lie awake going over the events of this evening. Instead, she was going to lie awake waiting for the medication, which she always carried with her, to kick in, willing herself not to throw up while she tried to ignore the vice crushing her skull and the metronome inside it.
Wow, it was a win-win situation!
She did throw up. In fact she spent half the night with her head in the toilet. It had been after four when she had finally crawled back to bed and fallen asleep, a fact that resulted in her spending an age in Make-up—or maybe that was normal for film? Angel didn’t have a clue and as she stepped out in front of the camera she was very conscious of her inexperience.
She told herself that no one wanted her to fail, but she could imagine a few people might be amused if she did. As it was, she didn’t mess up. Apparently the first full morning’s filming had gone well, though to Angel the progress had seemed torturously slow.
She said as much to her co-star, if that was the right description of the actor who was to play opposite her in the soap-style series of adverts.
‘Take up knitting like me, darling,’ he advised.
‘How long do you think we have for lunch?’
‘In my humble opinion...’ he began.
Angel couldn’t not smile. In her opinion Clive didn’t have a humble bone in his body.
‘All right, not so humble.’ He might not do humble, but he did have a sense of humour. ‘We have finished for the day.’
It turned out he was right.
Angel had already checked it out so she knew that the narrow strait of water that separated the private island from the hotel beach was safe. So when she declined a seat on the boat in favour of swimming the short distance her co-star responded in much the same way he had when he’d found her reading a book.
‘For pleasure?’
Angel, who knew he had a post-grad degree, suspected he was never off duty, always playing his part as the pretty-but-dim public school boy that most of his well-paid Hollywood roles had involved him playing.
The deep turquoise water was warm and Angel, who was a strong swimmer, was a couple hundred yards from the beach when she stopped and began to tread water, watching the people on the beach before flipping onto her back to float lazily.
It was the angry metallic buzz sound of the Jet Ski that made her lift her head. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have seen the kid who had obviously drifted out farther than he intended on an inflatable toy, and she watched in horror as he fell off into the path of the Jet Ski.
Two things became immediately obvious. One, he couldn’t swim very well and two, the driver of the Jet Ski couldn’t see him.
Her yelled warning alerted the people on the shore, several of whom entered the water shouting, but the Jet Ski rider remained oblivious and she was a hell of a lot closer than anyone else.
With a pounding front crawl that left her breathless, Angel managed to get to the child and make sure he stayed afloat. But it became harder to stay that way when the boy let go of the inflatable and transferred his hold to her neck, gripping tightly. Pulled under without a chance to fill her lungs, she surfaced a few moments later with the kid latched on like a limpet only to see the Jet Ski heading right for them.
At the last moment she pushed the kid’s face into her shoulder and closed her eyes, not perhaps the most practical response, but it worked to the extent that they were still alive when she opened them. Though this was, it turned out, less to do with her closed eyes and more to do with the Jet Ski rider seeing them at the last moment.
He swerved and didn’t quite miss them. But her shoulder only took a glancing blow, which she barely noticed, as at this point she was busy struggling to stay afloat. The kid was half strangling her with his grip, and the close encounter with the Jet Ski had seriously freaked him out so he had begun kicking out wildly with his legs.
The relief when a speedboat pulled up alongside and someone hauled him up out of her arms was intense.
‘Thank you so much.’ Her grateful waterlogged smile faded slightly when she saw the owner of the hand she had grabbed gratefully on to, his face a dark shadow against the sun shining directly into her eyes. But there was no mistaking his identity.
She landed in the boat in a staggeringly inelegant, breathless heap and crawled onto a bench seat.
‘You’re all right?’
‘Fine,’ she lied, finding herself nodding meekly in response to his stern, ‘Don’t move.’ As if she could have if she’d wanted to!
* * *
Alex didn’t trust himself to respond to this patent lie and maintained his silence on the way back to shore, choosing not to compete with the boy, who was now bawling in his ear very loudly.
‘I want my mum.’
‘She is welcome to you.’
Angel gasped. ‘Don’t be so mean. Can’t you see that the poor thing is upset?’
He was upset! Alex was pretty sure