She laughed bitterly. ‘Poor Leo. What a blow to have ended up stuck in my pub with no mod cons, having to clear snow and help with the washing up. How you must have missed your flash car and designer clothes! I bet you didn’t bank on having to stick around for as long as you did.’
‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.’
But he had flushed darkly and was finding it difficult to meet her fierce, accusatory green-eyed stare. ‘I’m sorry,’ Brianna apologised with saccharine insincerity. ‘I find it really hard to be sweet and smiling when I’ve just discovered that the guy I’ve been sleeping with is a liar.’
‘Which never made our passion any less incendiary.’
Her eyes tangled with his and she felt the hot, slow burn of an unwitting arousal that made her ball her hands into angry fists. Unbelievable: her body responding to some primitive vibe that was still running between them like a live current that couldn’t be switched off.
‘Why did you bother to make up some stupid story about being a writer?’ she flung at him. ‘Why didn’t you say that you were just another rich businessman who wanted to spend a few days slumming it and winding down? Why the fairy story? Was that all part of the let’s adopt a different persona?’ She kept her eyes firmly focused on his face but she was still taking in the perfection of the whole, the amazing body, the strong arms, the length of his legs. Knowing exactly what he looked like underneath the clothes didn’t help. ‘Well?’ she persisted in the face of his silence.
‘The story is a little more complex than a bid to take time out from my life here...’
‘What do you mean?’ She was overwhelmed by a wave of giddiness. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his face and she found that she was sitting ramrod erect, as rigid as a plank of wood, her hands positioned squarely on her knees.
‘There was a reason I came to Ballybay.’ Always in control of all situations, Leo scowled at the unpleasant and uncustomary sensation of finding himself on the back foot. Suddenly the clinical, expensive sophistication of his surroundings irritated the hell out of him. It was an unsuitable environment in which to be having this sort of highly personal conversation. But would ‘warm and cosy’ have made any difference? He had to do what he had to do. That was just the way life was. She would be hurt, but she was young and she would get over it. It wasn’t as though he had made her promises he had had no intention of keeping!
He unrealistically told himself that she might even benefit from the experience. She had not had a lover for years. He had crashed through that icy barrier and reintroduced her to normal, physical interaction between two people; had opened the door for her to move forward and get back out there in the real world, find herself a guy to settle down with...
That thought seemed spectacularly unappealing and he jettisoned it immediately. No point losing track of the moment and getting wrapped up in useless speculation and hypotheses.
‘A reason?’
‘I was looking for someone.’ He sat heavily on the chair facing hers and, as her posture was tense and upright, so his was the exact opposite as he leaned towards her, legs wide apart, his strong forearms resting on his thighs. He could feel her hurt withdrawal from him and it did weird things to his state of mind.
‘Who?’
‘It might help if I told you a little bit about myself, Brianna.’
‘You mean aside from the lies you’ve already told me?’
‘The lies were necessary, or at least it seemed so at the time.’
‘Lies are never necessary.’
‘And that’s a point we can possibly debate at a later date. For now, let me start by telling you that I was adopted at birth. It’s nothing that is a state secret, but the reason I came to Ballybay is because I traced my birth mother a few years ago and I concluded that finding her was something I had to do. Not while my adoptive parents were still alive. I loved them very much; I would never have wanted to hurt them in any way.’
Brianna stared at him open-mouthed. It felt as though the connections in her brain were all backfiring so that nothing made sense any more. What on earth was he going on about? And how could he just sit there as though this was the most normal conversation in the world?
‘You’re adopted?’ was all she could say weakly, because she just couldn’t seem to join the dots in the conversation.
‘I grew up in leafy, affluent suburbia, the only child of a couple who couldn’t have children of their own. I knew from the beginning that I was adopted, and it has to be said that they gave me the sort of upbringing that most kids could only dream about.’
‘But you didn’t want to find your real mother until now?’
‘Real mother is not a term I would use. And finding her would not have been appropriate had my adoptive parents still been alive. Like I said, I owe everything to them, and they would have been hurt had I announced that I was off on a journey of discovery.’
‘But they’re no longer alive. And so you decided to trace your...your...’
‘I’ve had the information on the woman for years, Brianna. I simply bided my time.’
Brianna stared at him. He’d simply bided his time? There was something so deliberate and so controlled about that simple statement that her head reeled.
‘And...and...you came to Ballybay and pretended to be someone you weren’t because...?
‘Because it was smaller than I imagined,’ he confessed truthfully. ‘And I wanted to find out about the woman before I passed judgement.’
‘You mean if you had announced yourself and told everyone why you were there...what? Your mother—sorry, your birth mother—would have tried to...to what?’ She looked around her at the staggering, shameless testimony to his well-heeled life and then settled her eyes back on him. ‘Did you think that you needed to keep your real identity a secret because if she knew how rich you were she would have tried to latch on to your money?’
Leo made an awkward, dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘I don’t allow people to latch on to my money,’ he said flatly. ‘No, I kept my identity a secret, as indeed my purpose in being there in the first place, because I wasn’t sure what I would do with the information I gathered.’
‘How can you talk about this with such a lack of emotion? I feel as though I’m seeing a stranger.’
Leo sat back and raked his fingers through his hair. He was being honest. In fact, he was sparing no detail when it came to telling the truth, yet he still felt like the guy wrecking Christmas by taking a gun to Santa Claus.
‘A stranger you’ve made love to countless times,’ he couldn’t help but murmur in a driven undertone that belied his cool exterior. He took a deep breath and tried to fight the intrusive memory of his hands over her smooth, slender body, tracing the light sprinkling of freckles on her collarbone, the circular discs of her nipples and the soft, downy hair between her legs. She was the most naturally, openly responsive lover he had ever had. When he parted her legs to cup the moisture between them, he felt her responding one-hundred per cent to his touch. She didn’t play games. She hadn’t hidden how he had made her feel.
‘And I wish I hadn’t.’ Brianna was momentarily distracted from the direction of their conversation.
‘You don’t mean that. Whatever you think of me now, your body was always on fire for mine!’
Again she felt that treacherous lick of desire speed along her nerve endings like an unwanted intruder bypassing all her fortifications. This was not a road she wanted to travel down, not at all. Not when everything was collapsing around her ears.
‘And did you find her?’ she asked tightly.
‘I did,’ he answered after only the briefest of hesitations.
‘Who is she?’
‘At the moment, she’s lying in the Cromwell Hospital.’
Brianna half-stood and then fell back onto the chair as though the air had been knocked out of her lungs.
His mother was Bridget. Bridget McGuire. And all of a sudden everything began falling into place with sickenin
g impact. Perhaps not immediately, but very quickly, he had ascertained that she knew Bridget, that she considered Bridget one of her closest friends. Try as she might, Brianna couldn’t reference the time scale of this conversation. Had it happened before he’d decided to prolong his stay? Surely it would have?
That realisation was like a physical blow because with it came the inevitable conclusion that he had used her. He had wanted to find out about his mother and she had been an umbilical cord to information he felt he might have needed; to soften her up and raise no suspicions, he had assumed the spurious identity of a writer. When he had been sitting in front of his computer, she’d assumed that he had been working on his book. Now, as head of whatever vast empire he ran, she realised he would have been working, communicating with the outside world from the dreary isolation of a small town in Ireland he would never have deigned to visit had he not needed to.
How could she have been so stupid, so naive? She had swooned like a foolish sixteen-year-old the second she had clapped eyes on him and had had no qualms about justifying her decision to leap into bed with him.
She had been his satisfying bonus for being stuck in the boondocks.
‘I didn’t even know that Bridget had ever had children... Does she know?’ Her voice was flat and devoid of any expression.
That, without the tears, told him all he needed to know about her state of mind. He had brought this on himself and he wasn’t going to flinch from this difficult conversation. He told himself that there had never been any notion of a long-lasting relationship with her, yet the repetition of that mantra failed to do its job, failed to make him feel any better.
‘No. She doesn’t.’
‘And when will you tell her?’
‘When I feel the time is right.’
‘If you wanted to find your mother and announce yourself—if you weren’t suspicious that she would try and con money out of you—then why the secrecy? Why didn’t you just do us all a favour: show up in your fancy car and present yourself as the long-lost prodigal son?’
‘Because I didn’t know what I was going to find, but I suspected that what I found would—how shall I put this?—not be to my liking.’
‘Hence all your warnings about her when I told you that she was going to be coming to the pub to stay after her bout in hospital...’ Brianna said slowly, feeling the thrust of yet another dagger deep down inside her. ‘You knew she was hiding a past and you assumed she was a lowlife who would end up taking advantage of me, stealing from me, even. What changed?’
Leo shrugged and Brianna rose to her feet and managed to put distance between them. For a few seconds she stared down at the eerily lit landscape below her, devoid of people, just patches of light interspersed with darkness. Then she returned to the chair and this time she forced herself to try and relax, to give him no opportunity to see just how badly she was affected by what he had said to her.
‘So you were using me all along,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You came to Ballybay with a purpose, found out that it wasn’t going to be as straightforward as you anticipated—because it’s the kind of small place where everybody knows everybody else, so you wouldn’t be able to pass unnoticed, without comment—you adopted an identity and the second you found out that I knew your mother...sorry, your birth mother...you decided that it would be an idea to get to know me better.’
Leo’s jaw hardened. Her inexorable conclusions left a bitter taste in his mouth but he wasn’t going to rail against them. What was needed here was a clean break. If she had become too involved, then what was the point in encouraging further involvement by entering into a debate on what he had meant or not meant to do?
His failure to deny or confirm her statement was almost more than Brianna could bear but she kept her voice cool and level and willed herself just to try and detach from the situation. At least here, now; later, she would release the emotion that was building inside her, piling up like water constrained by paper-thin walls, ready to burst its banks and destroy everything in its path.
She could read nothing from his expression. Where was the guy she had laughed with? Made love to? Teased? Who was this implacable stranger sitting in front of her?
How, even more fatally, could she have made such a colossal mistake again? Misjudged someone so utterly that their withdrawal came as complete shock? Except this time it was all so much worse. She had known him for a fraction of the time she had known Daniel. Yet she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the impact Daniel had made on her all those years ago was nothing in comparison to what she would feel when she walked away from this. How was that possible? And yet she knew that what Leo had generated inside her had reached deeper and faster and was more profound in a million ways.
‘I guess you decided that sleeping with me would be a good way to get background information on Bridget. Or maybe it was just something that was given to you on a silver platter.’ Bitterness crept into her voice because she knew very well that what she said was the absolute truth. He hadn’t had to energise himself into trying to get her into bed. She had leapt in before he had even finished asking the question.
‘We enjoyed one another, Brianna. God, never have I apologised so much and so sincerely.’
‘Except I wasn’t using you.’ She chose to ignore his apology because, in the big picture, it was just stupid and meaningless.
‘I...’ Wasn’t using you? How much of that statement could he truthfully deny? ‘That doesn’t detract from the fact that what we had was real.’
‘Don’t you mean that the sex we had was real? Because beyond that we didn’t have anything. You were supposed to be a writer travelling through, getting inspiration.’ The conversation seemed to be going round and round in circles and she couldn’t see a way of leading it towards anything that could resemble a conclusion. It felt like being in a labyrinth and she began walking on wooden legs towards her coat which she had earlier dumped on one of the chairs.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Where do you think, Leo? I’m leaving.’
‘To go where? For God’s sake, Brianna, there are guest rooms galore in this apartment. Pick whichever one you want to use! This is all a shock, I get that, but you can’t just run out of here with nowhere to go!’ Frustration laced his words with a savage urgency that made him darken and he sprang up, took a couple of steps towards her and then stopped.
They stood staring at one another. Her open transparency, which was so much part and parcel of her personality, had been replaced by a frozen aloofness that was doing all sorts of crazy, unexpected things to his head. He was overcome with an uncontrollable desire to smash things. He turned sharply away. His head was telling him that if she wanted to go, then he should let her go, but his body was already missing the feel of hers and he was enraged with himself for being sidestepped by an emotion over which he appeared to have no control.
Brianna could sense the shift of his body away from her, even though she was trying hard not to actually look at him, and that was just a further strike of the hammer. He couldn’t even look at her. She was now disposable, however much he had wanted her. He had found his mother, had had whatever conversation with her that had changed his mind about her, and now he had no further use for the woman he had taken and used.
‘Well?’ he demanded roughly. ‘Where are you going to go at this hour? Brianna, please...’
She wanted to tell him that the last thing she could do was sleep in one of his guest bedrooms. Just the thought of him being under the same roof would have kept her up all night.
She backed towards the door. ‘I’m going to go to the hospital.’
‘And do what there, Brianna? Visiting hours are well and truly over and I don’t think they’ll allow overnight guests in the common area.’ He felt as though he was being ripped apart. ‘You have my word that I won’t come near you,’ he said, attempting to soften his tone. ‘I’ll leave the apartment, if you want. Go stay in a hotel.’
Did he thi
nk that she was scared that he might try and break down her bedroom door so that he could ravish her? Did he honestly imagine that she was foolish enough to fear any such thing after what he had said?
‘You can leave or you can stay, Leo.’ She gave a jerky shake of her shoulder. ‘I don’t honestly care. I’m going to the hospital and, no, I won’t be trying to cadge a night’s sleep on the sofa in the common area. I’m going to leave a letter for one of the nurses to hand to Bridget in the morning, explaining that I’ve had to get back to the pub.’
‘And the reason for that being...?’ There were shadows under her eyes. He didn’t feel proud to acknowledge the fact that he had put them there. His guilty conscience refused to be reined in. ‘What reason could you have for needing to rush back to the pub? Or do you intend to tell Bridget the truth about who I am?’
‘I would never do that, Leo, and the fact that you would think that I might just shows how little you know me. As little, as it turns out, I know you. We were just a couple of strangers having fun for a few weeks.’ Her heart constricted painfully when she said that. ‘I know you think that I’m all wrapped up in you, but I’m not. I’m upset because I didn’t take you for a liar and, now that I know what you are, I’m glad this is all over. Next to you, Daniel was a walk in the park!’
For several reasons, none of which she intended to divulge, this was closer to the truth than he could ever imagine and she could see from his dark flush that she had hit home. He had been fond of referring to her distant ex as one of life’s great losers.
She stuck her chin up and looked him squarely in the eyes without flinching. ‘After I’ve been to the hospital, I shall find somewhere cheap to stay until I can catch the first train out of London.’
‘This isn’t Ballybay! London isn’t safe at night to be wandering around in search of cheap hotels!’
Secrets of a Ruthless Tycoon Page 12
