Melodramatic, yes, Maxie acknowledged. She had been. Inexplicably, she had gone off the deep end and hurled recriminations that she had never intended to voice. And, like the shrewd operator he was, Angelos Petronides had trained those terrifyingly astute eyes on her while she recklessly exposed private, personal feelings of bitter pain and insecurity.
It was stress which had done this to her. Leland’s heart attack, the sudden resulting upheaval in her own life, the dreadful publicity, her godmother’s death. The pressure had got to her and blown her wide open in front of a male who zeroed in on any weakness like a predator. Low self-esteem...she did not suffer from low self-esteem!
A limousine drew up several yards ahead of her in the quiet side-street she was traversing. Alighting in one fluid movement, Angelos ran exasperated eyes over her sodden appearance and grated, ‘Get in out of the rain, you foolish woman...don’t you even know to take shelter when it’s wet?’
Swallowing hard on that in-your-face onslaught, Maxie pushed shaking fingers through the wet strands of hair clinging to her brow and answered him with a blistering look of charged defiance. ‘Go drop yourself down a drain!’
‘Will you scream assault if I just throw you in the car?’ Angelos demanded with raw impatience.
A kind of madness powered Maxie then, adrenaline racing through her. She squared up to him, scarlet dress plastered to her fantastic body, the stretchy hemline riding up on her long, fabulous legs. She dared him with her furious eyes and her attitude and watched his powerful hands clench into fists of self-restraint—because of course he was far too clever to make a risky move like that.
‘Why are you following me?’ she breathed.
‘I’m not into railway sets...too slow, too quiet,’ Angelos confessed.
‘I’m not into egocentric dominating men who think they know everything better than me!’ Maxie slung back at him, watching his luxuriant ebony hair begin to curl in the steady rain, glistening crystalline drops running down his hard cheekbones. And she thought crazily, He’s getting wet for me, and she liked that idea.
‘If this is my cue to say I might change...sorry, no can do. I am what I am,’ Angelos Petronides spelt out.
Stupid not to take a lift when she could have one, Maxie decided on the spur of the moment, particularly when she was beginning to feel cold and uncomfortable in her wet clothing. Sidestepping him, enjoying the awareness that she was rather surprising him, she climbed into the limousine.
The big car purred away from the kerb.
‘I decided to make you angry because I want you to leave me alone,’ Maxie told him truthfully.
‘Then why didn’t you stay away from me? Why did you get into this car?’ Angelos countered with lethal precision.
In answer, Maxie made an instinctive and instantaneous shift across the seat towards the passenger door. But, before she could try to jump back out of the car, a powerful hand whipped out to close over hers and hold her fast. The limousine quickened speed.
Black eyes clashed with hers. ‘Are you suicidal?’ Angelos bit out crushingly.
Maxie shakily pulled free of his grasp.
The heavy silence clawed at her nerves. Such a simple question, such a lethally simple, clever question, yet it had flummoxed her. If she had truly wanted to avoid him, why had she let something as trivial as wet clothes push her back into his company?
Angelos extended a lean brown hand again, with the aspect of an adult taking reluctant pity on a sulky child. ‘Come here,’ he urged.
Without looking at him again, Maxie curled into the far corner of the back seat instead. His larger-than-life image was already engraved inside her head. She didn’t know what was happening to her, why she was reacting so violently to him. Her own increasing turmoil and the suspicion that she was adrift in dangerously unfamiliar territory frankly frightened her. Angelos Petronides was bad news in every way for a woman like her. Avoiding him like the plague was the only common sense response. And she should’ve been freezing him out, not screaming at him.
With a languorous sigh, Angelos shrugged fluidly out of his suit jacket. Without warning he caught her hand and pulled her to him. Taken by surprise, Maxie went crazy, struggling wildly to untangle herself from those powerful fingers. ‘Let go! What are you trying to—?’
‘Stop it!’ Angelos thundered down at her, and he released her again in an exaggerated movement, spreading both arms wide as if to demonstrate that he carried no offensive weapon. ‘I don’t like hysterical women.’
‘I’m not...I’m not like that.’ Maxie quivered in shock and stark embarrassment as he draped his grey jacket round her slim, taut shoulders. The silk lining was still warm from his body heat. The faint scent of him clung to the garment and her nostrils flared. Clean, husky male, laced with the merest tang of some citrus-based lotion. She lowered her damp head and breathed that aroma in deep. The very physicality of that spontaneous act shook her.
‘You’re as high-strung as some of my racehorses,’ Angelos contradicted. ‘Every time I come close you leap about a foot in the air—’
‘I didn’t yesterday,’ she muttered with sudden lancing bitterness.
‘You didn’t get the chance...I crept up on you.’ With a tormentingly sexy sound of indolent amusement, Angelos reached out his hands and closed them over the sleeves of the jacket she now wore, tugging on them like fabric chains of captivity to bring her to him.
‘No!’ Maxie gasped, wide-eyed, her hands flying up, only to find that the only place she could plant her palms was against his broad, muscular chest.
‘If you like, you can bail out after the first kiss—no questions asked, no strings attached,’ Angelos promised thickly.
Even touching him through his shirt felt so incredibly intimate that guilty quivers ran through her tautening length. He was so hot. Her fingers spread and then shifted over the tactile silk barner, learning of the rough whorls of hair below the fabric and enthralled. She was used to being around male models with shiny shaven chests. She shivered deliciously, appallingly tempted to rip open the shirt and explore.
Heavily lidded black eyes lambent with sensual indulgence intercepted hers. ‘You look like a guilty child with her hand caught in the biscuit tin,’ he confided with a lazy smile.
At the power of that smile, the breath tripped in Maxie’s throat, her pupils dilating. His proximity mesmerised her. She could see tiny gold lights in his eyes, appreciate the incredible silky length and luxuriance of those black lashes and the faint blue shadow on his strong jawline. The potency of her own fascination filled her with alarm. ‘You’re all wrong for me,’ she said in breathless panic, like a woman trying to run through a swamp and inexplicably finding herself standing still and sinking fast.
‘Prove it,’ Angelos invited in that velvet-soft drawl that fingered down her spine like a caress. A confident hand pushed into her drying hair and curved to the nape of her neck. ‘Prove that anything that feels this good could possibly be wrong for either of us.’
He was so stunningly gorgeous, she couldn’t think straight. Her heartbeat seemed to be racing in her tight throat. The insidious rise of her own excitement was like a drowning, overwhelming wave that drove all before it. He dropped his eyes to the pouting distended buds clearly delineated by the clinging bodice of her dress and her face burned red.
Slowly Angelos tilted her back, his arms banding round her spine to support her, and, bending his dark, arrogant head, he pressed the mouth she craved on hers to the thrusting sensitivity of an aching nipple instead. Her whole body jumped, throat arching, head falling back, teeth clenching on an incoherent whimper of shock.
Angelos lifted her up again, black eyes blazing with primal male satisfaction. ‘It hurts to want this much. I don’t think you were familiar with the feeling...but now you