‘I don’t see the point of conjecture. We have to deal with the here and now.’
‘How can you be so...practical?’
‘Because one of us needs to be.’
‘I can’t marry you. Yes, I know I should be hardened and cynical—but I’m not.’
Leo could recognise defeat as well as the next man. He’d approached the situation from the only perspective that made sense and had automatically assumed that she would fall in line—because, frankly, what woman wouldn’t? He’d failed to take into account the fact that it was fair to say in the short space of time he’d known her she had been nothing like any of the women he had ever gone out with. So why should she react with any degree of predictability?
Too late he was recognising that she was as headstrong and stubborn as a mule, and as capable of digging her heels in as strenuously as he was.
‘Are you telling me that you’d like to spread your net and see what you can catch while you’re pregnant with my baby?’
‘Of course not! What man is going to look twice at a woman who’s having someone else’s child?’
‘You’d be shocked,’ he muttered in a driven undertone.
When he thought of her putting herself out there, finding some loser who was only interested in spinning her some line so that he could crawl all over her body, he saw red. But he was quick enough to realise that any show of anger wasn’t going to cut it. The more he tried to cajole and badger her into seeing things from his point of view, the more she was going to backpedal and see him as the bad guy, trying to force her into a loathsome life of undiluted luxury.
‘Okay.’ He held his hand up in a gesture of surrender that made Maddie narrow her eyes suspiciously. ‘Let’s move on to another pragmatic approach to the situation. One that excludes what I still maintain is the most desirable solution. You don’t want marriage? Well, I can’t frogmarch you up the aisle, bound and tied. But we’re going to have to approach this calmly.’
He patted the space on the sofa next to him and she sat down and twisted to look at him.
His dark, dark blue eyes immediately made Maddie feel hot and bothered, but when she looked away all she could see was the taut pull of his trousers over his muscular thighs, the bronzed forearms liberally sprinkled with dark hair, the way that dark hair curled round the matt gold of his watch strap... She felt faint.
‘Go on,’ she managed to croak, noting that he had dumped the marriage solution faster than the speed of light when she’d provided him with a get-out clause.
‘I will want to be actively involved in everything from this point onwards. And I certainly will not risk you doing a runner by buying the store from you. You want it. It’s yours. That way I am assured that you won’t be leaving the place any time soon.’
‘But you live here...in London...’
‘And naturally I’ll continue to oversee things here. But I can run my empire from anywhere in the world, such is the nature of communications these days. And Dublin seems to be an extremely charming place in which to settle... Nice restaurants, spectacular scenery, friendly locals...’
Leo thought that he could usefully live there for a few months and use that time to source an alternative location for his business... Or he might just explore the outskirts of the city and put in place the makings of a golf complex which he had been toying with for some time. It would be a little holiday, in a manner of speaking.
Naturally his grandfather would be curious as to his sudden change of location from London to Dublin, and the absence of a deal on the store, and in due course Leo would explain all. If Maddie was wary of him, then being confronted by his grandfather, whose thoughts about children being born out of wedlock were firmly rooted somewhere in the Victorian era, would have her running for the hills.
And, up close and personal, he would be able to keep an eye on her. She had dug her heels in and refused the marriage solution, but there was more than one way to skin a cat, and Leo was in little doubt that she would see the wisdom of that solution once she began to struggle with the technicalities of running a store...when the difficulties of being a single parent loomed all the more glaringly.
Because he would be there right next to her—a constant alternative waiting in the wings. He would get the girl, he thought, even if he had to play the waiting game for a bit.
‘But you don’t... You don’t have anywhere to live here...’
Maddie wondered what it would be like to live with him, to wake up next to him every morning and go to sleep with the warmth of his body against hers. And then she immediately killed that stupid fantasy, because nothing could be further from reality.
This was never going to be a love story with a happy ending.
‘That won’t be a problem.’ Leo shrugged. ‘I’ll buy somewhere.’
‘Buy somewhere?’
‘You’d be surprised how fast a house can change hands when enough money is put on the table,’ Leo said drily. ‘I don’t foresee a problem.’
‘I won’t do a runner. How can I when I’ll have a store to oversee? There’s no need for you to decamp to Ireland.’
Leo spread his arms wide in a gesture of magnanimity which made her think of a predatory shark, trying to convince a school of minnows that, no, it wasn’t in the least bit interested in gobbling them up.
‘Like I said, whether you do a runner or not, I intend to be here for you every step of the way.’ He shot her a slow, curling smile. ‘You’ll have me around twenty-four-seven—without the inconvenience of a wedding ring on your finger...’
CHAPTER SEVEN
MADDIE LOOKED AT the half-finished building work which she had tentatively begun on her house six weeks previously. It was just another aggravating headache added to the pile of aggravating headaches which had been slowly but steadily mounting ever since she had confidently declared to Leo that if he didn’t want to buy the store from her then she was overjoyed, because she would be able to rebuild her family’s legacy and return it to its former glory.
Niggling problems had arisen at the store. Missing stock, inadequate paperwork for suppliers which had only just come to light, a persistent leak in one of the departments on the top floor, which the plumbing team had ominously told her ‘looked bad’... After that she had dismissed them, so that she could consider her options.
Several members of staff had also chosen to quit, following the announcement of her ownership, and replacing them was proving another headache because everyone seemed to think that there was no chance the store was a viable employer—even though she had personally sat in at all the interviews and done her best to persuade them otherwise.
And now this.
Maddie sighed and contemplated the exposed plasterboard and the flooring which had been ripped up—but not in its entirety. Which meant that half the kitchen floor was comprised of the original tired tiles and the other half of bare brick and wood, with enough gaps to let in several families of rodents.
The fridge had been disconnected, and now the builder had phoned to say that he wasn’t going to be around for the next week because of a ‘personal emergency’.
Maddie looked at her phone.
Leo.
She didn’t want to think of him but she did. She couldn’t help herself. True to his word, he had been around a lot. Phoning her. Arranging to meet her for lunch. Insisting on doing the occasional grocery shop with her because he wanted to make sure she was buying food that was nutritious.
She refused to invite him back to her house, just as she discouraged his visits to the store. She wanted and needed her independence. She’d turned him down and for good reason. The last thing she wanted was to drift into a state where she found herself depending on him, and she knew that was a real danger because he was just so damned present. The perfect gentleman.
There had been no mention of marriage, nothing that could be
construed as being remotely sexual... He was just strong, reliable, and annoyingly, infuriatingly helpful.
Maddie knew that she should be grateful that he’d never overstepped the mark.
She didn’t want him in the house? He shrugged and took the hint with alacrity.
She was vague about him visiting the store? He acquiesced with another of those non-committal shrugs of his.
He treated her as though she was made of porcelain, and the only time she’d sensed that he was having trouble backing down was when she had absolutely refused to see his private doctor on a weekly basis because it was ‘better safe than sorry’.
All in all, he had treated her with tact, consideration and a detached courtesy. And, however much she told herself that that was a good thing, she hated it.
On the spur of the moment she dialled the hotline number. For the first time since he had given it to her weeks ago.
* * *
In the middle of a high-level meeting, attended by a select handful of people who had come to see him because he had no intention of spreading himself thin by going to see them, Leo raised one imperious hand, at which all conversation stopped.
Maddie’s name had flashed up on his screen, and since it was the first time she had deigned to call him he had no intention of ignoring the call.
Frankly, he’d grown tired of waiting. To start with he’d expected her to phone him within a few days—if only because he called her with tiresome regularity, and whatever had happened to good manners and meeting halfway on the effort front?
Then, when no phone call had materialised, he’d banked on that changing just as soon as she’d unearthed all the problems at the store. Hadn’t he volunteered to help her often enough?
Several weeks later and he’d all but given up.
‘Leo,’ he said now, without preamble.
‘Sorry, I’m disturbing you,’ Maddie apologised, the reluctance in her voice making it clear how uncomfortable she was having given in to the temptation of calling him.
Leo looked at the room full of important people who had gathered there for his convenience. ‘Not in the slightest.’
‘It’s just that...’
‘Tell me what’s wrong.’ He half turned, making a motion with one hand to inform the gathering that they were to continue without him and indicating that his second-in-command would host.
‘Nothing’s wrong... It’s just that...well... I’m here at home...’ Maddie gazed with despair at the half-finished kitchen, in which cooking no halfway decent meal had been possible for the past two weeks. ‘And I’m having one or two little problems... It’s nothing, really... I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘I’m on my way.’
Leo killed the phone call before she could launch into a long-winded monologue of apology.
For the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to be worried. He was worried now. He’d never met anyone as stubbornly determined to be self-sufficient as Maddie, and the fact that she had confessed to having ‘one or two problems’ was a source of high-voltage concern—because ‘one or two problems’ could range from a chipped nail to the sky falling down.
No, he thought, scrap the chipped nail and go straight to the sky falling down.
His Ferrari was equipped to deliver him to her house in record time, and he rang the doorbell and kept his finger there, already planning on breaking the door down if she didn’t answer it within ten seconds.
She answered it before brute force became necessary.
‘What’s wrong?’ were his opening words as he strode past her into the hall and then spun round on his heel, eyes narrowed, inspecting her from head to toe for visible signs of distress.
She was as stunning as she always was. Very slightly showing her pregnancy now, but it was hardly noticeable under the jogging bottoms and the baggy top.
Distractedly, Leo marvelled that she could take the most unfortunate of outfits and turn it into something intensely sexy.
He shifted impatiently as his body began to undermine his common sense. As it was wont to do with predictable regularity. She’d laid down her parameters six weeks ago—turned his marriage proposal down and all but said that she deserved someone better than him, someone more suitable, someone who came with the full package.
Forced into a corner, and obliged to bide his time, Leo knew that he couldn’t risk undermining his own objectives by giving in to the temptation to put that will power of hers to the test.
He focused on her face, but there was no reprieve there because the connection that lured him in wasn’t just about the way she looked or the way his body reacted to hers. Something ran deeper, like a powerful underwater current, and that pull operated on a completely different level.
Leo frowned, as he always did when this kind of thinking ambushed him, not quite knowing what to do with the confused jumble of feelings he couldn’t seem to pin down and box up. He spoke to her on the phone and her voice did something to him. It was bizarre, a little perplexing. He didn’t care to dwell on it.
Instead, he thought about those sidelong glances when she’d thought he wasn’t looking. He could have done something about that, but he’d backed away. Push her even a little at the wrong time, he’d reasoned, and she would be off. And he wasn’t going to risk that happening just for the sake of staunching the painful ache of desire that took him over whenever he was around her.
For someone as accustomed as he was to the transitory nature of lust, Leo was a little shocked at how much he still wanted to touch Maddie. Even when she wasn’t around she was in his head like a burr. Was it because she had been elevated to a position never previously occupied by any other woman? Mother of his unborn baby. Or was it because the physical side of their relationship had not been allowed to follow its natural course and wind down to its inevitable conclusion?
Maybe it was a mixture of both. Leo didn’t know. He just knew that he seemed to be engaged in a permanent battle to keep his hands off her.
Maddie chewed her lip—and then she did the absolute unthinkable. She burst into tears.
Panicked, Leo pulled her to him and held her close. He smoothed her hair and mumbled softly. Just when he needed a handkerchief he discovered that he didn’t have one, so he wiped her cheek with his knuckle and listened to her tell him that nothing was wrong, that she didn’t know why she was crying and that it could only be hormones—and actually she shouldn’t have called him.
‘Talk to me,’ was his response to all that.
‘I feel overwhelmed,’ Maddie confessed in a small voice, getting her crazy crying jag under control but not pulling out of his embrace ‘The store... The house...’
Since Leo had only heard about developments at the store second-hand, and hadn’t been to the house at all, he took a chance to look around him, then beyond her, to the open door through which he glimpsed the chaos of what remained of the kitchen.
Swearing softly under his breath, he edged her away from him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He wanted to sweep her off her feet and carry her to the scene of the crime, but rather than spook her with caveman antics he shuffled, still holding her, until they were both in the kitchen. He settled her into one of the chairs that hadn’t been rehomed somewhere else while work was being carried out.
Or not, judging from the state of things.
He inspected the shoddy, half-finished mess.
An unusable kitchen.
Leo looked around for another chair and then, not finding one handy, did the caveman thing after all and swept her off her feet as though she weighed nothing. He carried her into the living room, which contained most of the displaced contents of the kitchen.
‘I repeat,’ he said, gently depositing her on the sofa and then dragging a chair over so that he could pin her to the spot without any room for manoeuvre, ‘why didn’t you t
ell me about this sooner?’
‘They said it would only take two weeks.’
‘Name of the company?’
‘Well...’
‘Maddie, just tell me who you employed to do this job.’
She fumbled with her cell phone and passed it to him, so that he could see the details of the company she’d used, and then, silencing her with one hand while he phoned them, she listened as he let rip.
No shouting, no bellowing and no threats. His voice was soft—dangerously soft—and the threat was implicit. ‘One week,’ he said, ‘and don’t make me regret giving you that long...’
And then he made her tell him, leaving nothing out, what was going on both in the store and the rest of the house.
The store would come together. At least he had a foothold of sorts there, and could make sure no disasters occurred. The house, on the other hand...
‘The kitchen is effectively out of bounds?’ he said finally, and Maddie nodded sheepishly.
‘So how have you been able to eat?’
‘I... Well...’
‘You’re pregnant, Maddie. I don’t want to hear any evasive non-answers. Yes, I have taken you out for dinners and the occasional lunch, but in between... Tell me what your diet has been. Because from the looks of it there have been no cooking facilities here for some time.’
Leo had never thought that being the Great Protector could feel so good.
‘A little over two weeks...’
‘That’s plenty long enough when you’re supposed to be putting nutrients into your body.’
‘I’ve been eating,’ she mumbled sheepishly, but he read in her eyes that it had been a long time since she had seen a homecooked meal.
‘This isn’t going to do,’ Leo said flatly. ‘I can’t stop you jeopardising your own well-being by living off preservative-stuffed junk food, but I can and will prevent you from damaging the baby you’re carrying!’
She pulled herself together and said primly, ‘Once everything’s in place my eating habits will return to normal. I love cooking. I would never not eat, and you don’t have to tell me that this isn’t a good time to have an erratic diet. I’m not an idiot.’
The Italian's One-Night Consequence Page 10
