Page 30 of The Secret Sanchez Heir
But he had had to face the stark truth, which was that they were no longer sleeping together and, effectively, she was a single woman who could do as she liked.
Which, of course, would be nothing, because if there was one thing he had worked out it was that she wasn’t the sort to jump into bed with a man just because the opportunity happened to present itself.
He almost laughed at the thought of her going to some office party and throwing herself around.
Yes, they would be going to a club, and indeed he knew the club they would be going to and had once been a regular there back in the day. And yes, sure, there would be music and dancing, although he personally had never been one of those gyrating on a dance floor, but doubtless she would miss Sam and would make her excuses to leave as early as possible.
He’d bet on it.
* * *
Abigail looked at her reflection in the mirror of the spare room she now occupied. The wardrobe spanned one entire wall and was completely mirrored. There was no escaping the reflection staring back at her. It felt odd to be dressed up when she had spent so many months in an array of unexciting work garb or old stay-at-home clothes that were suitable for holding a baby.
Since Leandro had re-entered her life, her wardrobe had undergone a radical transformation because he had insisted that she buy herself stuff she could go out in. He had even bought a couple of dresses for her himself, which had seemed extraordinary at the time, but she had quietly put those to the back of the wardrobe because she was assailed by a weird feeling of guilt whenever she thought about wearing them.
She’d extracted one of those dresses now and she had to admit that it fit like a dream.
It was figure-hugging, short and, despite the very modest neckline and three-quarter-length sleeves, still managed to look incredibly sexy.
Maybe because it was fire-engine red. For better or for worse, one look at her and people would stop dead in their tracks, and that was exactly what she wanted them to do because her confidence levels were at an all-time low.
Things between Leandro and herself had changed so quickly from wonderful to nightmarish.
One phone call.
Why couldn’t he have told her what it had been about? How hard would it have been for him just to have said that he had been on the phone to a work colleague? Very hard, she reckoned, if that phone call had been from a prospective lover, and surely it had been or he would have explained the situation?
He was seeing someone else. Or, at the very least, he was contemplating it.
Abigail couldn’t bear the thought of it. When she had heard a woman’s voice down the end of the line, the jealousy that had gripped her had been as powerful as a vice squeezing her heart. Since then she had feverishly found herself imagining what woman. Blonde? Brunette? Tall? Short? Past flame? Potential flame? She’d been driven crazy with her imagining.
And, when she hadn’t been busy imagining, she had been sensible enough to work out that their trial period—which she could now see she had optimistically undertaken in the wild hope that he would find himself loving her, and proposing to her all over again for the right reasons—was at an end.
She had taken herself off to the spare room on the night of the phone call. Leandro hadn’t objected. He had watched her move her stuff out and close the door on sex and he hadn’t tried to win her back. Considering the sex had been so powerful, that pretty much said it all as far as she was concerned.
Her heart was breaking, but she was keeping it together, trying to make sure that she behaved like an adult for Sam’s sake. She wasn’t going to run away or take out her sadness and hurt by being mean to Leandro. Once upon a time, she’d let her emotions determine her behaviour and had deprived him of the first ten months of his son’s life and, looking back, she could see that although she had done that without malevolence she’d been misguided.
So she was polite to him. They made conversation. She kept her distance and communicated the way she would have communicated with a perfect stranger, even though every time she looked at his lean, achingly beautiful face her heart squeezed tighter and the hollow in the pit of her stomach hurt more.
She would have to move on with her life, whilst recognising that he would still be a part of it whether she liked it or not. She would still have to see him. When she moved out to the cottage, he would probably show up one day with the very woman he had been talking to on the phone in that guilty, hushed voice. And she would have to face her replacement with equanimity and get on with it.
‘Getting on with it’ meant having a life of her own. She’d decided that step one to achieving that would be to go out to the party Vanessa had arranged and have fun.
Hence the dress. And the make-up, which was deceptively light but definitely effective. And the hair, which she’d had styled at the hairdressers. Trimmed and straightened, it hung down to her waist in a colourful golden curtain.
She had already settled Sam and, sticking her feet into some very high sandals, she had a few quick words with the nanny and then hurried out to get into the taxi which she had ordered earlier. She could easily have taken Leandro’s driver, but not relying on such luxuries seemed a vital step in reasserting the independence which she had gradually forfeited during the time she had spent succumbing to Leandro’s charms and nurturing hopeless fantasies about happy-ever-afters.
The club was in the centre of London and by the time Abigail got there, having texted Vanessa to warn her that she would be arriving—so that she didn’t turn up at the place and find herself on her own, having to order a drink at a bar and hope she didn’t look as if she had been stood up by a hot date—it was already heaving.
Taking a deep breath, she headed in, very much aware of heads swinging in her direction, and decided that she was going to have fun if it killed her.
* * *
Leandro wasn’t quite sure how, at a little after nine-thirty, he found himself outside the club where Abigail’s leaving party was taking place. It seemed that one minute he’d been engrossed in the finer points of due diligence, and the next he’d been in the back of his car on his way to Valentino’s.
Outside, there was a polite gathering of well-heeled, well-dressed thirty-somethings, mostly smoking and holding flutes of champagne. The men had dispensed with their obligatory jackets but the women were still decked out in their finery, even if they were beginning to look a little less groomed than they had probably looked two hours previously.
The doormen looked bored. Valentino’s was an exclusive members-only club and the opportunities for getting rid of riff raff would be remote.
