Page 24 of The Secret Sanchez Heir
‘Sex isn’t a powerful bond,’ Abigail denied with a frightening lack of conviction. ‘And is that why you wanted to make love to me? So that you could prove a point? That would be a really hateful thing to do.’
‘That’s not why I wanted to make love to you,’ Leandro said with complete sincerity. ‘I wanted to make love to you because I can’t resist you.’
‘Lust disappears,’ she was constrained to point out.
‘Most things do but who says that it disappears any faster than all that heady emotion people call love? You might be pregnant by me right now.’
‘That would be appalling,’ Abigail wailed, but he was still doing that thing with his thigh, and she was finding it hard to keep track of why she should be horrified.
She should be horrified, shouldn’t she? He didn’t love her and he never would, and lust did fade, and when it did it left nothing behind, nothing concrete that could ever shore up the walls of a relationship. Without love, those fortifications would crumble the minute the sex went off the boil.
But he was still moving his thigh between her legs and she could feel herself climbing again towards a climax. She gyrated against him and orgasmed, shuddering, moaning and clutching his broad shoulders, not caring that he was looking at her flushed face and open mouth, hearing the sounds of her physical satisfaction. In fact, she rather enjoyed the sensation of being observed. It was wanton and really, really sexy.
A thought flew through her head, like quicksilver. If he didn’t mind the thought of getting her pregnant, what did that say?
It told her one thing and it was that he wanted their relationship to work. He didn’t want to marry her with divorce as an option to be kept within sight. If that had been the case, he would never, ever have risked her getting pregnant with a second child.
Could what they had really work? she wondered. In a rush, she saw all the upsides to a situation she had previously discarded as being ridiculous.
Sam would have both parents there for him and that could only be a good thing. When it came to parenthood, you had to put all your selfish traits to one side and do what was best for your child, and she was unwillingly aware that being in a couple with Leandro would be best for their son.
Then there was the little matter of the separate lives he had talked about. If they were together, she wouldn’t have to worry about him heading straight into the arms of some woman who wanted to prove that she could be suitable stepmother material. She wouldn’t have to face a future riven with jealousy she was forced to conceal.
Because she would be jealous. She couldn’t bear the thought of him sleeping with anyone else.
Because she was still in love with him.
The realisation didn’t jump out at her like a jack-in-the-box, a shocking revelation. It crept out as something she had known all along, deep down. Lust didn’t last, but if they both worked truly hard at making things work between them then who was to say that he wouldn’t, one day, come to love her the way she loved him? He knew everything there was to know about her now. He knew who she was and where she had come from.
The future suddenly glimmered in front of her, full of possibilities.
‘You’re not saying anything.’ Leandro had a surprising urge for Abigail to put him out of his misery. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’
‘I bet that’s something you’ve never asked any woman to do before,’ she teased, and he relaxed. It was crazy but he felt quite heady with relief because she wasn’t fighting him. He intended to capitalise on that if it killed him.
‘Well...?’ he pressed impatiently, and Abigail sighed, smiled and looked at the familiar lines of his beautiful face.
‘You’re right,’ she said softly. ‘Sam deserves the chance of both parents being there for him. But...’ She hesitated and then ploughed on. ‘I won’t marry you. Let’s live together, Leandro. Let’s see if we can work together as parents...’
It wasn’t what he wanted but he figured that it was a great deal better than nothing. ‘If that’s how you want to play it,’ he conceded gracefully, already making plans to improve on that concession with the greatest possible speed, ‘then very well. We’ll see if it works between us. For our son’s sake.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
ABIGAIL STOOD LOOKING at the little cottage. It was in a beautiful location, forty-five minutes out of London and accessed via picturesque little lanes.
She still had to pinch herself that Leandro was the same man who had pronounced only several weeks ago that the only thing he wanted from her was sex, because as far as he was concerned she was no more than unfinished business waiting for a line to be drawn under it.
When she had decided to tell him about Sam, she hadn’t known what to expect. He didn’t love her. In fact, he felt the opposite. Nor had marriage ever been on his agenda before. Not even Rosalind, with her impeccable connections and shared social circle, had been able to persuade him otherwise.
Yet, after the initial shock, he had rallied his forces and handled the explosion thrown at him with admirable aplomb. His proposal of marriage had been from a keen sense of duty, which was something she figured out, because the minute he had been given an out he had been happy to accept the far less committed alternative.
Since they had reached the decision to live together nearly two months ago, Leandro had been a model of attentiveness. Anything, it would seem, to further his desire to be a good father. Abigail wasn’t entirely surprised, because Leandro always had been a man who threw himself one hundred per cent into everything he did, which was one of the reasons why he had become so successful at such a young age.
Faced with the shock of ready-made fatherhood, he had not run from commitment, but instead had dealt with the situation head on.
It would have been so tempting to think that he had feelings for her and not just for Sam, but she wasn’t stupid. He would have married her because, traditionalist to the core, he had seen nothing wrong in making the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his son. Over the past few weeks, she had come more and more to understand why. Occasionally, when his guard was down, he would let fall little snippets of information about his own childhood and she now had a little more idea of the boy who had become the man.
However, happily released from the duty of putting a wedding ring on her finger, Leandro was doing the next best thing, which was proving to her that he could be the best father possible.
