He sighed with frustrated impatience and bit down hard on the bitter recriminations that begged to find a way out. They would be at his apartment in under five minutes. He’d drawn the partition and his driver couldn’t hear a word they were saying but he still felt that he needed her somewhere entirely private in which to have this life-changing conversation. The back of a car just wasn’t working for him.
‘I told you,’ Abigail reminded him in a driven voice, ‘I was scared. Scared that you would try and take him away from me—that I would never be able to fight you, because you’re rich and powerful, and at the time I was jobless and virtually unemployable, thanks to that scumbag of an ex-boss who’d lied about me.’
‘What makes you think that I won’t try and do that now?’ Leandro asked.
Abigail froze and looked at him with horror. ‘You wouldn’t dare!’
‘It’s always a mistake to lay down a challenge to a man like me.’ Leandro let the silence stretch between them, interminably long. Why not let her imagination go wild? It was the very least she deserved, as far as he was concerned.
‘We’re here. We can continue this conversation inside.’
Abigail, who could hardly think for the blind panic racing through her, and the worst-case scenarios filling her head, glanced distractedly at the elegant white building in front of which the car was slowing. Precise, black wrought-iron railings enhanced the windows, which were perfectly spaced and perfectly rectangular—like a child’s drawing of what the outside of a house should look like, with all the dimensions of ruler-like precision. They entered a large hallway, tiled in original Victorian tiles, and were whooshed up in silence in the lift to his apartment, which she found extended over two floors and was as big as a house.
It was all white, aside from the dramatic, abstract works of art on the walls. The floor was blonde wood. There were no curtains at all, just shutters. The staircase that wound up to a galleried landing was the least child-friendly item of house décor she had ever seen in her entire life. Metal and with a token safety railing that would encourage any adventurous toddler to fall under. She was horrified.
Leandro was watching her carefully, and he frowned, because his apartment never failed to impress. He’d employed the best interior designer in London who had sourced materials from across Europe to create the perfect place. No expense had been spared and that was obvious, from the rich grey granite in the open-plan kitchen, to the pale wood on the floor which had been specially flown in from The Netherlands at great cost. Half of the paintings were by iconic and recognisable artists, the other half were investment pieces by up-and-coming artists, and their value increased weekly. The furniture was all bespoke.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked irritably and Abigail swivelled round to look at him, her hands belligerently folded.
‘I hate this apartment,’ she said bluntly, spreading one arm wide in a gesture of dismissal that got on his nerves.
‘Don’t be crazy. Of course you don’t. No one hates this apartment.’
‘It’s...it’s...soulless...cold. A mausoleum would have more atmosphere!’
Leandro glowered and remembered that she had never been shy about speaking her mind. In fact, she’d been the only woman in living memory ever to have disagreed with him about anything and he’d enjoyed it. She’d always been magnificent when she was arguing. She looked bloody magnificent now. He stared at her in brooding silence, noting the hectic flush in her cheeks, the pinkness of her full mouth and the fiery glitter in her bright green eyes.
Faster than a speeding bullet, his body responded to her with shocking enthusiasm. He hardened and his desire increased. Disgusted with himself, Leandro turned away and headed for one of the cream sofas artfully arranged around the only rug in the apartment, a grey hand-woven affair with a bold white, abstract pattern.
‘Speaking of residences,’ he told her coldly, ‘let’s move away from the shocking condition of mine and let’s talk about yours. When you were thinking about yourself and making your far-reaching decision to exclude me from my son’s life, did you ever stop to think that he might have benefited from the financial support I would have been able to give? That, instead of condemning him to a house the size of a matchbox, his life may very well have been improved by being somewhere bigger? Understood, at the age of ten months it’s not that urgent, but what when he begins to crawl? To walk around? Were you so busy being selfish that you managed to happily justify denying him all the advantages my money could have brought to the situation?’
Abigail flushed, dismayed at being labelled selfish, yet seeing it from his point of view and not at all liking the picture he was painting of her.
‘And what about,’ Leandro continued mercilessly, ‘when my son got old enough to start wondering where his father was?’
‘Stop referring to Sam as your son. He’s our son.’ Warmth spread through her because, unwittingly, she had joined them up, voiced what she had denied for the past year and a half: that she wasn’t the only parent involved in this equation. She’d pretended that she was, but that was no longer the case, and she thought uneasily that perhaps it shouldn’t have been the case at all. Not that she was going to start apologising for anything.
Leandro didn’t miss that slip of the tongue and was quietly pleased because it showed that she was no longer fighting him. It didn’t make it any easier to stomach what she had done but, in truth, he could almost see her point of view. He had walked away without giving her the chance to defend herself. He had taken his sister at her word and had refused to see that the woman he’d been sleeping with, the woman he’d felt he’d known, might have had her reasons for not being quite as open with him as she could have been. He’d reached conclusions and he had thrown those conclusions at her and, yes, they’d pretty much added up to her being a thief, a liar and, by extension, a gold-digger.
Well, if time had proved one thing, it was this. She was no gold-digger or else she would have landed on his doorstep within seconds of finding out that she was pregnant. She wouldn’t have avoided him, she would actively have sought him out, because—he had to face it—she would have been holding the ultimate trump card.
She was telling the truth when she said that she’d been scared and he knew why—because he was ruthless. She’d been terrified of him trying to take her child away from her, and she’d had good cause to be apprehensive because of the way they’d broken up. And not just that, he was forced to concede with searing honesty—he had always made it clear to her that he wasn’t interested in commitment, even though he had come uncomfortably close to revising that decision during the time he’d been with her. He grudgingly admitted to himself for the first time that this was possibly why he had rushed to believe Cecilia, but had rushed to break off the relationship with Abigail, a relationship that had come way too close to challenging his long-held beliefs.
He thought of her alone—scared, broke and dealing with a momentous situation on her own.
Had there even been anyone by her side when she’d delivered Sam? Or had she got herself off to hospital on her own?
‘I did think about what might happen when Sam was old enough to start being curious,’ Abigail muttered uncomfortably.
‘And what conclusions had you come to?’ Disconcerted by the introspective route his thoughts had taken him, Leandro’s tone was sharper and cooler than he’d intended. ‘Had you decided that you’d write off my existence on a permanent basis to make life easier for you? “Lost at sea” or something like that?’
‘No!’ Abigail was horrified that he could come to such a conclusion. Was he being serious? ‘I would never, ever have done anything like that!’ She found that she couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to him. Indeed, she felt physically ill at the thought.
His tone softened at the distraught expression on her face. From old, he knew that her fire was counterbalanced by a real capacity for empathy.
How was it that he hadn’t seen that at the time, when he had walked out on her without a backward glance?
‘You need to think past yourself,’ he urged, leaning forward, forearms resting on his thighs, all his leashed power at bay but ferocious intent still stamped on his lean, beautiful face. ‘Think about what Sam will think if years down the road he believes that you deprived him of a lifestyle that could have been within his reach.’