‘I won’t get pregnant! I’m one-hundred per cent sure about that! I know my body. You don’t have to look as though...as though the sky has fallen in!’
Yes, he was a nomad. Yes, he had just jacked in his job to embark on a precarious and unpredictable career. But did he have to look so damned appalled? And then, hard on the heels of that thought, came wrenching dismay at the insanity of thinking that a pregnancy wouldn’t be the end of the world. God, what was she thinking? Had she gone completely mad?
She snatched the various bits and pieces left on the kitchen table and began slamming them into cupboards.
‘God knows, you’re probably right,’ he gritted, catching her by the arm and pulling her round to face him. ‘But I’ve had sufficient experience of the fairer sex to know that they—’
‘What experience? What are you talking about?’
Leo paused. Money bred suspicion and he had always been suspicious enough to know that it was a mistake to trust contraception to the opposite sex.
Except, how could he say that when he was supposed to be a struggling writer existing on the remnants of his savings from whatever two-bit job he had been in? How could he confess that five years previously he had had a scare with a woman in the dying stages of their relationship. The Pill she claimed to have been on, which she then later denied... Two weeks of hell cursing himself for having been a trusting idiot and, in the end, thankfully there had been no pregnancy. There was nothing he could have done in the circumstances, but a split condom was still bad news.
But how could he concede that his vast financial reserves made him a natural target for potential gold-diggers?
‘You must really think that you’re such a desirable catch that women just can’t help wanting to tie you down by falling pregnant!’
‘So you’re telling me that I’m not a desirable catch?’ Crisis over. Deception, even as an acceptable means to an end, was proving unsavoury. He smiled a sexy half-smile, clearing his head of any shade of guilt, telling himself that a chance in a million did not constitute anything to get worked up about.
‘There are better options...’ The tension slowly seeped out of her although she was tempted to pry further, to find out who these determined women were—the ones he had bedded, the ones who had wanted more.
She tried to picture him in his other life, sitting in a cubicle behind a desk somewhere with a computer in front of him. She couldn’t. He seemed so at home in casual clothes; dealing with the snow; making sure the fireplace was well supplied with logs; doing little handyman jobs around the place, the sort she usually ended up having to pay someone to do for her. He now had a stubbly six o’clock shadow on his jawline because he told her that he saw no point in shaving twice a day. He was a man made for the great outdoor life. And yet...
‘You were going to tell me about Bridget,’ Leo said casually, moving to sit at the table and shoving his chair out so that he could stretch his legs in front of him. ‘Before you rudely decided to interrupt the conversation by demanding sex.’
Brianna laughed. Just like that, whatever mood had swept over her like an ugly, freak wave looming unexpectedly from calm waters dissolved and disappeared.
‘As I said, you’ll like her.’ She began unloading the dishwasher, her mind only half-focused on what she was saying; she was looking ahead to the technicalities of keeping the pub shut, wondering how long she could afford the luxury, trying to figure out whether her battered four-wheel drive could make it to the village so that she could stock up on food...
Leo’s lips twisted with disdain. ‘Funnily enough, whenever someone has said that to me in the past I’m guaranteed to dislike the person in question.’ For the first time, he thought of his birth mother in a way that wasn’t exclusively abstract, wasn’t merely a jigsaw piece that had to be located and slotted in for the completed picture.
What did she look like? Tall, short, fat, thin...? And from whom had he inherited his non-Irish looks? His adoptive parents had both been small, neat and fair-haired. He had towered above them, dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned...as physically different from them as chalk from cheese.
He stamped down his surge of curiosity and reminded himself that he wasn’t here to form any kind of relationship with the woman but merely finally to lay an uncertain past to rest. Anger, curiosity and confusion were unhappy life companions and the faster he dispensed with them, the better.
‘You’re very suspicious, Leo.’ Brianna thought back to his vehement declaration that women couldn’t be trusted when it came to contraception. ‘Everyone loves Bridget.’
‘You mentioned that she didn’t have a...partner.’ A passing remark on which Brianna had not elaborated. Now, Leo was determined to prise as much information out of her as he could, information that would be a useful backdrop for when he met the woman the following day. It was a given, he recognised, that some people might think him heartless to extract information from the woman he was sleeping with, but he decided to view that as a necessity—something that couldn’t be helped, something to be completely disassociated from the fact that they were lovers, and extremely passionate lovers at that.
Life, generally speaking, was all about people using people. If he hadn’t learned that directly from his adoptive parents, then he certainly must have had it cemented somewhere deep within his consciousness. Perhaps, and in spite of his remarkably stable background, the fact that he was adopted had allowed a seed of cynicism to run rampant over the years.
‘She doesn’t talk much about that.’
‘No? Why not? You’re her...what would you say...confidante? I would have thought that she would find it a comfort to talk to you about whatever happened. I mean, you’ve known each other how long? Were your parents friends with the woman?’
Brianna laughed. ‘Oh, gosh, no!’ She glanced round the kitchen, making sure that all her jobs were done. ‘Bridget is a relative newcomer to this area.’
‘Really...’ Leo murmured. ‘I was under the impression that she was a valued, long-standing member of the community.’ He almost laughed at the thought of that. Valued member of the community? Whilst jettisoning an unwanted child like an item of disposable garbage? Only in a community of jailbirds would someone like that have been up for consideration as a valued member.
‘But now you tell me that she’s a newcomer. How long has she been living in the area?’
‘Eight years tops.’
‘And before that?’
Brianna shot him a look of mild curiosity but, when he smiled that smile at her, that crooked, sexy half-smile, she felt any niggling questions hovering on the tip of her tongue disappear.
‘You’re asking a lot of questions,’ she murmured breathlessly. He signalled for her to come closer and she did, until he could wrap his arms around her and hold her close.
‘Like I said, I have a curious mind.’ He breathed in the clean floral scent of her hair and for a few seconds forgot everything. ‘You shouldn’t have put your jumper back on,’ he remarked in a voice that thrilled her to the core. ‘I like looking at your breasts. Just the perfect mouthful...’
‘And I have calls to make if I’m to keep the pub shut!’ She slapped away his wandering hand, even though she would have liked nothing more than to drag him up to the bedroom to lay claim to him. ‘And you have a book to work on!’
‘I’d rather work on you...’
‘Thank goodness Bridget isn’t here. She’d be horrified.’
Leo nearly burst out laughing. ‘And is this because she’s the soul of prurience? You still haven’t told me where she came from. Maybe she was a nun in her former life?’ He began strolling out of the kitchen towards the sitting room with the open fire which he had requisitioned as his working space. His computer was shut and there was a stack of novels by the side of it, books he had picked from her collection. He had already started two, abandoned them both and was reaching the conclusion that soul-searching novels with complicated themes were not for him.
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’ Brianna hovered by the table as he sat down. She knew that he demanded complete privacy when he was writing, sectioning off a corner of the sitting area, his back to the window. Yet somehow it felt as though their conversation was not quite at an end, even though he wasn’t asking any further questions.
‘Was I?’
His cool, dark eyes rested on her and she flushed and traced an invisible pattern with her finger on the table. Was there something she was missing? Some important link she was failing to connect?
‘You’ve known this woman for a few years...’
‘Nearly seven. She came to the pub one evening on her own.’
‘In other words, she has a drinking habit?’
‘No! She’d moved to the area and she thought it might be a way of meeting people! We have quiz nights here once a month. She used to come for the quiz nights, and after a while we got chatting.’
‘Chatting about where she had come from? Oh no; of course, you know nothing about that. And I’m guessing not many clues as to what she was doing here either? It’s a small place for a woman who wants to meet people...’
‘It’s a community. We make outsiders feel welcome.’ She blushed at her unwitting choice of words. ‘I felt sorry for her,’ Brianna continued hurriedly. ‘I started an over-forties’ quiz night, ladies only, so that she could get talking to some of them.’
Leo was mentally joining the dots and was arriving at a picture not dissimilar to the one he had always had of the woman who had given birth to him—with a few extra trimmings thrown in for good measure.
A new life and a new start for someone with a dubious past to conceal. Tellingly, no one knew about this past life, including the girl who had supposedly become her anchor in the community.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that, where there were secrets that required concealment, those secrets were dirty little ones. He had received half a picture from Brianna, he was certain of it—the rosy half, the half that didn’t conform to his expectations.
‘And you did all this without having a clue as to this woman’s past?’
‘I don’t need to know every single detail about someone’s past to recognise a good person when I see one!’ She folded her arms tightly around her and glared down at him. She should have let him carry on with his writing. Instead, she had somehow found herself embroiled in an argument she hadn’t courted and was dismayed at how sick it made her feel. ‘I don’t want to argue with you about this, Leo.’
‘You’re young. You’re generous and trusting. You’re about to give house room to someone whose past is a mystery.’ He drew an uneasy parallel with his own circumstance, here at the pub under a very dubious cloud of deceit indeed, and dismissed any similarities. He was, after all, as upstanding and law-abiding as they came. No shady past here.
On the very point of tipping over into anger that he was in the process of dismissing her as the sort of gullible fool who might be taken in by someone who was up to no good, another thought lodged in the back of her mind. It took up residence next to the pernicious feel-good seed that had been planted when she had considered the possibility that he might not be welcoming Bridget because he cherished their one-to-one solitude.
Was he seriously worried about her? And if he was... That thought joined the other links in the chain that seemed to represent the nebulous beginnings of a commitment...
She knew that she was treading on very dangerous ground even having these crazy day dreams but she couldn’t push them away. With her heart beating like a jack hammer, she attempted to squash the thrilling notion that he was concerned about her welfare.
‘Do you think that my friend might be a homicidal maniac in the guise of a friendly and rather lonely woman?’
Leo frowned darkly. Brianna’s thoughts about Bridget were frankly none of his concern, and irrelevant to the matter in hand, but he couldn’t contain a surge of sudden, disorienting protectiveness.
Brianna had had to put her dreams and ambitions on hold to take charge of her father’s failing business, whilst at the same time trying to deal with the double heartbreak of her father’s death and her lover’s abandonment. It should have been enough to turn her into an embittered shrew. Yet there was a transparent openness and natural honesty about her that had surfaced through the challenging debris of her past. She laughed a lot, she seldom complained and she was the sort of girl who would never spare an act of kindness.
‘When people remove themselves for no apparent reason to start a new beginning, it’s usually because they’re running away from something.’
‘You mean the police?’
Leo shrugged and tugged her towards him so that she collapsed on his lap with a stifled laugh. ‘What if she turns into an unwanted pub guest who overstays her welcome?’ He angled her so that she was straddling him on his lap and delicately pushed up the jumper.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Brianna contradicted him breathlessly. ‘You should get down to your writing. I should continue with my stock taking...’
In response to that, Leo eased the jumper off and gazed at her small, pert breasts with rampant satisfaction. He began licking one of her nipples, a lazy, light, teasing with the tip of his tongue, a connoisseur sampling an exquisite and irresistible offering.
‘She has a perfectly nice little house of her own.’ There was something wonderfully decadent about doing this, sitting on his lap in the middle of the empty pub, watching him as he nuzzled her breast as if he had all the time in the world and was in no hurry to take things to the next level.
‘But—’ Leo broke off. ‘Here...’ he flicked his tongue against her other nipple ‘...she would have...’ he suckled for a few seconds, drawing her breast into his mouth ‘...you...’ a few kisses on the soft roundness until he could feel her shiver and shudder ‘...to take care of her; cook her food...’
He held one of her breasts in his hand so that it was pushed up to him, the nipple engorged and throbbing, and he delicately sucked it. ‘Brianna, she might seem perfectly harmless to you.’ With a sigh, he leaned back in the chair and gave her tingling breasts a momentary reprieve. ‘But what do you do if she decides that a cosy room in a pub, surrounded by people and hands-on waitress service, is more appealing than an empty house and the exertion of having to cook her own food?’
At no point was he inclined to give the woman the benefit of the doubt. In his experience, people rarely deserved that luxury, and certainly not someone with her particular shady history.
Never one ever to have been possessive or protective about the women in his life, he was a little shaken by the fierce streak suddenly racing through him that was repelled by the thought of someone taking advantage of the girl sitting on his lap with the easy smile, the flushed face and tousled hair.
‘You need to exercise caution,’ he muttered grimly. He raked his fingers through his hair and scowled, as though she had decided to disagree with him even though she hadn’t uttered a word.
‘Then maybe,’ Brianna teased him lightly, ‘you should stick around and make sure I don’t end up becoming a patsy...’
The journey here should have taken no time at all; his stay should have been over in a matter of a couple of days. There were meetings waiting for him and urgent trips abroad that could only be deferred for so long. It had never been his intention to turn this simple fact-finding exercise into a drama in three parts.
‘Maybe I should,’ he heard himself say softly. ‘For a while...’
‘And you can chase her away if she turns out to be an unscrupulous squatter who wants to take advantage of me.’ She laughed as though nothing could be more ridiculous and raised her hand to caress his cheek.
Leo circled her slim wrist with his fingers in a vice-like grip. ‘Oh, if she tries that,’ he said in a voice that made her shiver, ‘she’ll discover just what a ruthless opponent I could prove to be—and just how regrettable it can be to cross my path.’
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SNOW HAD stopped. As grey and leaden as the skies had been for a seemingly unstoppable length of time, the sun now emerged, turning a bleak winter landscape into a scene from a movie: bright-blue skies and fields of purest white.
Bridget’s arrival had been delayed by a day, during which time Leo had allowed the subject of her dubious, unknown past to be dropped. No more hassle warning Brianna about accepting the cuckoo in the nest. No more words of caution that the person she might have considered a friend and surrogate mother might very well turn out to be someone all set to take full advantage of her generous nature and hospitality. There would be fallout from this gesture of putting the woman up while she recuperated; he was certain of that and he would be the man to deal with it. So he might never have specialised in the role of ‘knight in shining armour’ in his life before, but he was happy with his decision.
London would have to take a little back seat for a while. He was managing to keep on top of things just fine via his computer, tablet and smartphone and, if anything dramatic arose, then he could always shoot down to sort it out.
All told, the prospect of being holed up in the middle of nowhere was not nearly as tedious as he might have imagined. In fact, all things considered, he was in tremendously high spirits.
Of course, Brianna was a hell of a long way responsible for that. He glanced up lazily from his computer to the sofa where she was sitting amidst piles of paperwork. Her hair was a rich tumble over her shoulders and she was cross-legged, leaning forward and chewing her lip as she stared at her way-past-its-sell-by-date computer which was on the low coffee table in front of her.
In a couple of hours the ambulance would be bringing his destiny towards him. For the moment, he intended to enjoy his woman. He closed the report in front of him and stood up, stretching, flexing his muscles.
From across the small, cosy room, Brianna looked up and, as always happened, her eyes lingered, absorbing the beautiful sight of his long, lean body; the way his jeans rode low on his hips; the way he filled out her father’s checked flannel shirt in just the right way. He had loosely rolled the sleeves to his elbow and his strong, brown forearms, liberally sprinkled with dark hair, sent a little shiver of pleasurable awareness rippling through her.
Secrets of a Ruthless Tycoon Page 7
