And this was about Angie’s brother, he reminded himself grimly. Alex…the spoiled, weak,thieving lout.

Stubborn to the last drop of her hot swirling blood, Angie opened up the chequebook, then

stretched across the desk to recover the pen. With a firm scrawl she laid her signature in the

appropriate place.

Angelina da Costa… She stared at it, vowing fiercely that it was going to be the very last time

she would ever sign that name.

Then he was right there behind her again like some grim dark power force, reaching for the

chequebook again, taking it from her resistant fingers yet again. This time he took it with him as

he strode around the desk. With a finality that made Angie choke out a gasp, he opened a

drawer and dropped the book into it, then closed the drawer again with a resolute snap.

Tall, dark, supremely in control of himself, he then lifted his proud dark head. ‘I think we will

begin this again from a more formal perspective,’ he intoned coolly.

Angie snapped her arms across her body to contain the way it wanted to shiver in the sudden

chill. ‘Please don’t hurt my brother,’ she begged.

LIKE a man hewn from stone, Leonardo showed no reaction whatsoever to her quivering climb

down.

‘He is a thief.’ He stated it brutally. ‘He stole your identity and committed credit card theft! And he did it with a complete disregard to the amount of money he was stealing from me. How can

you, Angie, of all people, want to defend him for doing that?’

She’d winced all the way through his cold judgement of Alex, but still it did not change a thing

she felt. ‘He’s my brother,’ she whispered.

And there it was, Leonardo recognized, the unconditional love she had a right to expect her

brother to return in equal measures. But somehow she did not seem to understand that.

‘I can pay you back the full amount he st … spent,’ she insisted, with only that small but telling

fault in the middle. ‘I will just need a little time to get it.’

‘By selling your flat and making yourself homeless?’ Leonardo was not impressed.

Neither was Angie. She flared him a scornful look, ‘My flat is worth more than fifty thousand

pounds, Leonardo,’ she informed him. ‘And you already have twenty thousand sitting in that

chequebook you’ve just stolen from me and put in that drawer!’

Fifty …Leonardo had stopped listening at fifty. His lean face carefully without expression, he

added lying wimp to his brother-in-law’s steadily mounting list of sins.

‘I’ll…I’ll go back to modelling,’ she explained quickly. ‘I’m still in demand, and Carla keeps on

trying to get me to change my mind, so I could earn the rest in..in..’

The way Leonardo flung himself across to the plate glass window behind the desk and thrust his

hands in his pockets made Angie’s voice slither to a strangled stop. It wasn’t so much that he’d

turned his back on what she’d been saying but the way he had done it which filled her with

dread.

When he wanted to, Leonardo could become chillingly unreachable. And he felt no love for Alex

at all. In his view her brother was the main reason why their marriage had fallen apart. He’d

refused to understand that in taking on the parental mantle for her brother she had a duty to see

her responsibilities to Alex through…even when they intruded an awful lot on their marriage.

It was just the way things had to be. Teenagers by reputation were rebellious and pushy and

difficult. And, okay, so Alex had played up to Leonardo often stinging criticism of him, she

conceded, but even that did not change the unalterable fact that standing between the two of

them had made her marriage a year long exhausting fight.

‘Please listen to me …’ Angie lowered her stubborn guard because she knew that she had to,

her voice trembling as she did so. ‘I can…’

‘No.’ He turned around again, and the moment she looked into his face she felt a wave of sick

apprehension riddle her stomach. ‘Not this time, Angie. This time you are going to listen to me.’

He strode back to the desk and opened the drawer again. With a graceful flick of his long fingers

he produced a folder which he set down on the desk. ‘Angie’, it said, in his own sharp scrawl on

the label. That was all…just ‘Angie’...yet seeing her name written there made Angie feel slightly

sick.

Opening the dossier and flicking through the pages until he found what he was looking for,

Leonardo then spun the whole thing round and sent it sliding across the desk, so it came to a

neat stop in front of her.

Mouth so dry now it felt as if she’d been eating sand, her eyelashes fluttered, and she looked

down and began to read. Her heart started to thump as she tallied up the column of figures on

the right hand side of a long list of transactions going back months and months. It was only

when she saw confirmation of the horrifying total at the bottom of the third page that she

finally…finally…blanched.

Leonardo was silent. He just stood there and let her discover how deeply her brother had

thrown her into debt to him. She could not even look at him. Horror and shame sent her

trembling fingers flicking back and forth through the pages in the vague hope that she’d

mis-tallied the figures…then it suddenly dawned on her.

‘Angie’ …

She looked up. ‘You thought it was me, didn’t you? ‘ she breathed unsteadily.

‘At first.’ Leonardo nodded. ‘I thought you were trying to force a response out of me, so I

decided to play along and see how far …’

His voice tailed off to an expressive grimace, leaving Angie to fill in the bit he’d left out. Forever

the strategist, she thought bleakly.

‘So you could have nipped Alex’s stupidity in the bud a whole lot sooner?’ Angie concluded

thickly. ‘Thanks for nothing, Leonardo.’

‘It was not mere stupidity, Angie. It was theft!’ Leonardo thrust out the hard distinction. ‘And when did you ever allow me any say over what your brother did?’ he added harshly. ‘I was the

interloper in my own marriage. If I uttered a complaint you went off the deep end. If I offered

advice you threw it back in my face. Well, this time it will be different.’ Reaching over, he drew the dossier back to his side of the desk. ‘This time I will have control of what this represents,

Angie, and you are going to have to swallow your frankly annoying stubbornness and deal with

that.’

The way he stabbed a long finger at the damning bank statements made Angie blink and her

eyes started to sting. ‘But…but you know I will get you the money,’ she choked in confusion.

‘Why are you making such a meal out of this?’

‘Because,’ Leonardo stated, ‘it is not your debt.’