Page 27 of The Secret Sanchez Heir
‘I didn’t feel comfortable doing that.’
‘Your choice. You can do what you like with this place and, for your information, it will be entirely in your name so you don’t have to feel that I own the roof over your head.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’ Abigail wondered whether that was another sign of him distancing himself from her.
‘I want you to feel secure,’ Leandro said gently. ‘And I know you’re proud, so I don’t want you to feel as though you’re indebted to me. You’re the mother of my child and I intend to look after you.’
He tilted her chin and feathered a kiss on her mouth, at which point her defence system was well and truly knocked for six. Of their own accord, her arms lifted, curved around his neck and pulled him towards her.
Sex. It always came back to this. Aside from his sense of duty, it was the thing that powered their relationship but, oh, how it left her feeling vulnerable. Yet, she couldn’t help but take what was on offer, torn between making the most of what she had while she had it and trying to resist so that she could start building her defences for when they parted company.
And there were times, such as now, when he was just so nice that she didn’t have it in her to resist him.
He could be so tough, so ridiculously forceful, yet at other times so unbearably tender that it took her breath away and left her feeling as helpless as a kitten.
She kissed him back, holding his face in her hands, and whispered guiltily, ‘We can’t.’
‘But I’m hungry for you, Abigail. Ravenous.’
‘Is sex the only thing you think about?’ she half-joked.
‘Is it my fault that you continue to do crazy things to my libido?’ He drew back and smoothed her hair with slightly less steady hands than he would have liked.
She was wearing a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved red tee shirt under a trench coat and she looked amazing. Fresh, wholesome, shockingly pretty and absolutely lacking in artifice.
‘I admit it wouldn’t be right to make love here,’ he conceded with obvious reluctance. ‘What sex on the ground gains in reckless impulse, it loses in sheer discomfort.’ He grabbed her hand and headed out of the cottage, carefully locking the door behind them and putting paid to any impulse she might have had to do another quick turn round the place.
He reversed at a pace back into the road. ‘But I can’t wait until we get back to London.’
‘Don’t be outrageous, Leandro.’
‘You make me outrageous.’ He shot her a look that was bone-meltingly sincere, and Abigail shivered and wondered whether he knew just how achingly addictive he could be without even realising it.
Soon he was gunning along the lanes, dusk falling steadily around them. With no traffic to speak of, they would have been back in London in less than two hours, so she was surprised when he swung the snazzy silver sports car into the courtyard of a country pub that was as picture-postcard perfect as the cottage had been.
‘I said I couldn’t wait,’ he growled.
Not even stopping to enjoy a glass of wine, they headed for the room he had rented for the sake of an hour and made love, wild, passionate love, that left her weak and clinging to him and crazily, stupidly happy.
‘That was such a decadent use of money,’ she giggled as they headed back down to London. ‘And what must that poor hotel manager be thinking?’
‘That he got a good deal,’ Leandro remarked wryly. ‘He rented us his most expensive suite and we were there for under an hour. He’s laughing all the way to the bank. Tomorrow I’m going to seal the deal with the house.’ He reached out and covered her hand with his. ‘Will you leave the job, Abby?’
Was that why he had made that very unusual detour? she wondered with unexpected cynicism. He knew that she was putty in his hands when they made love. But, no, she couldn’t credit him with that amount of deviousness, even though he was a man who was accustomed to getting what he wanted at whatever the cost.
‘I guess I will,’ she said at last, knowing that she truly did want to spend her time with Sam, even if it meant giving Leandro his way. ‘But I shall miss working there. Vanessa has been very good to me and I owe her a huge debt of gratitude.’
‘So do I,’ Leandro said gravely and she looked at him in surprise.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he glanced at her briefly, ‘It’s bad enough thinking of you broke and down on your luck while you were pregnant, but it’s worse when I think of what might have happened if you hadn’t had that lifeline extended to you.’
* * *
Sam was asleep by the time they returned to Leandro’s apartment at a little after seven-thirty. The nanny—a lovely young woman who absolutely adored the baby—spent a few minutes telling them what escapades he had got up to in their absence, and as soon as she had gone they both went into the room which had been turned into his nursery and gazed down at their son.
Typically, no expense had been spared in the decoration of the room. The walls were a pale blue with a hand-painted scene from a popular children’s movie on one of the walls. In the corner of the room, a tepee had been erected with a sheepskin rug in which he could cocoon himself. Next to the tepee was a giant stuffed toy—a surprise present from Leandro, bought a couple of weeks previously.
