Page 18 of The Secret Sanchez Heir
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He didn’t get in touch, but by lunchtime the following day she was contacted by a consultant employed by him to perform the test, and by six that evening the technician had come and gone and she had received a call from Leandro informing her that he, too, had been tested in accordance with the paternity-test requirements.
If Abigail had been hoping for some kind of clue as to what he was thinking underneath the clipped voice and the curt words, then she’d been barking up the wrong tree. The conversation, the first she’d had with him since he’d left her house, lasted ten seconds.
But the DNA test results would take at least a week, when you factored in overworked and underpaid health service workers who couldn’t jump to attention and put their particular kit to the top of the queue. A week of breathing space. It would give her time to plan ahead for all possible eventualities.
She hadn’t been expecting to see Leandro three days after he had left her house, and she certainly hadn’t been expecting him to show up at the shop in all his dark, avenging glory.
About to leave for the day, Abigail looked up and there he was, standing in the doorway, a tall, commanding presence that made her breath hitch in her throat and set up a nervous drum beat in her chest.
Everyone in the shop instantly stopped what they’d been doing. Two customers fell silent and stared. Brian, who worked alongside her, gaped. A woman, who looked no older than twenty-one and was dripping in jewellery, started breathing far more quickly than could be deemed healthy. Leandro ignored them all. He strolled towards her, face cool, expression unreadable.
Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, Abigail was finding it a challenge to move a muscle. In fact, she was finding it a challenge to breathe as he continued to close the distance between them.
‘The results are back.’
She blinked and unfroze. ‘I... I thought you said that you were going to call me.’
‘I thought that breaking the news face to face would be a far better idea. We need to talk, Abigail, and unless you want us to have this conversation here then you’re going to make your excuses and leave.’
‘But I’m not due to finish for another two hours!’
‘I don’t care if you’ve just stepped through the door to start your day.’ He looked around him, caught Brian’s eye and turned back to her. ‘That the guy in charge?’
‘Give me five minutes... And, please, could you wait outside?’
‘I’m very comfortable here.’
Abigail glared but had a hurried, low-key conversation with Brian and within minutes they were outside, back in the freezing February cold.
‘My car is over there.’ Leandro nodded towards the black chauffeur-driven car. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go to my apartment—which is twenty minutes away—we are going to have a civilised conversation, and then we are going to go and get my son from whatever day-care place you’ve stuck him in.’
‘You can’t order me around.’ But Abigail heard the weakness in her voice that signalled capitulation.
‘You should be glad I’ve decided to go down the civilised route, Abigail. Because, right now, the last thing I feel is civilised.’
‘Look...’ She turned to him as the car into which she had been channelled like a kidnap victim pulled away, ‘I can understand that you might be a little...annoyed...’
‘A little annoyed?’ Leandro looked at her with scathing disbelief. She was wearing practically the same drab outfit she’d been wearing when she had crash-landed back into his life days before. Her hair was tightly pulled back and her face was bare of all but minimal make-up. She looked like a mid-level career woman. Neither in her demeanour nor in her svelte shape did she betray any signs of being a mother. There was no way he could ever have guessed that she was, and again it hit him like a sledgehammer that she had kept his son from him.
She’d given him a way out with her speech about not wanting anything from him and, although he had never contemplated fatherhood, that ‘way out’ had struck him as offensive and insulting. His reaction had surprised him in its ferocity, as had the surge of primitive emotion that had gripped him when he had slit open that hand-delivered report to discover what he had known all along: the chances of him being Sam’s father were ninety-nine per cent.
‘What gave you the right to withhold my son from me?’ Leandro gritted. ‘Did you think that because we had broken up I was no longer due the decency of being told that I had fathered a child?’
Abigail flushed. For a man who was so good at keeping his emotions in check, those few words were incendiary.
They fired her up into a burning anger that matched his. What gave him the right to lay into her? They hadn’t just broken up. He had rid himself of her the way someone would rid themselves of vermin. He had dispatched her as a criminal and a liar and now had the barefaced nerve to accuse her of lacking the decency to tell him that she had been pregnant!
‘Start as you mean to go on’ was the saying that sprang to mind, and Abigail suspected that, if she started by lying down and becoming a doormat he felt free to walk all over, then that would be her role forever, whatever joint way forward they finally found.
‘I wasn’t exactly filled with confidence that, if I threw myself at your feet and told you that I was pregnant, you wouldn’t do your best to hurt me for all that stuff you’d been told by your sister!’
‘The truth, you mean?’
‘There you go! It was over three months after we broke up before I even found out that I was pregnant. I was so anxious about my future, so desperate to get a job, so worried about where I would end up living because all my savings were running out, that I didn’t even notice that my periods had stopped! And, yes, I suppose I could have come running to you for help, but guess what? When you’re accused of being a liar and a thief and a gold-digger, the last thing that occurs to you in a moment of blind panic is to turn to your accuser for help.’
‘I wasn’t just a random ex-boyfriend.’ Leandro wasn’t going to let her get away with that, ‘I was the man who’d fathered the child you were carrying.’
