Page 26 of Bound By Her Baby Revelation (Hot Winter Escapes)

She’d never felt anything like it and she wondered whether this was what her mother had felt time and time again. But no... When Kaya took a step back and looked at this situation rationally, she knew that it was nothing like what her mother had succumbed to over and over. This wasn’t a reckless search for love, clinging to crumbs thrown at her, desperate for the comfort of settling down and finding stability.

She wasn’t her mother.

She knew the score even though she wasn’t experienced when it came to sex. She knew what to avoid and she knew that, when it came to anything long-term, Leo was definitely not made of the right material.

When she thought like that, she felt a disturbing sliver of excitement race through her.

Who needed the right material all the time? Had that been a mistake—to put all her eggs in one basket? To think that, if she couldn’t have it all—the complete fairy-tale, happy-ever-after ending—then it was better to have nothing at all?

He was looking at her in guarded silence and Kaya side-stepped all those unsettling thoughts. She couldn’t afford to go there. Could she?

‘It’s up to you,’ she said with a casual shrug, rising to her feet and then over-egging the pudding by wincing, a reminder that the sore ankle—which actually felt as good as new—could hive off at any given moment while she was driving and do its own thing.

‘You win.’ Leo growled, standing up to glare at her. ‘Give me ten minutes. And in case you’re wondering...’ He reached to where she kept her car keys on a hook by the kitchen door and slipped them into his pocket with a grin. ‘We’ll take my car.’

CHAPTER SIX

‘HOWDIDYOUget involved with this place? Now that we’re heading there, you might just as well fill me in.’

Leo slanted a sideways glance at the woman sitting next to him, staring through the window with just the smallest of smiles on her face.

He fancied he could detect triumph there. There was no point agitating for an argument about this trip to a place he had no interest in seeing. Truth was, her ankle appeared to be fine, judging from her easy walk to the car. She’d made a show of limping around the kitchen but had obviously forgotten to prolong the act once she’d managed to get him on board for a visit to the halfway house.

‘Where to start?’ Kaya murmured.

‘Perhaps not at the very beginning,’ Leo suggested politely. ‘A brief summing up might be the best idea.’

Kaya glanced across. She’d felt his eyes on her but now he was staring straight ahead, concentrating on the road. Although the snow had stopped falling, there was still sufficient banked to the side to make driving conditions hazardous.

It was a beautiful morning: bright-blue skies and everything in sharp relief, from the silhouettes of the wintry trees with their naked branches to the crisp colours of the occasional farm house they passed, burrowed far from the road, just about visible across snow-covered fields.

Cities might hold the buzz of excitement but nothing could really beat the peace of a place like this, where people had time to appreciate the small details that nature gave them, from the grass growing in summer, to the leaves falling in autumn and the wondrous vastness of the open, uncluttered skies.

‘I’ll try but the beginning is a long time ago, when my mother first moved here from Alaska. I know you don’t want to talk about Julie Anne...’

‘Don’t worry yourself about me. Trust me, my sensibilities are remarkably resilient. A few facts and figures might prepare me for what I’m going to find, so you can stick to that brief.’

Kaya had no intention of throwing him a few facts and figures or sticking to any such brief. She had a suspicion as to what he meant by ‘sticking to the facts and figures’. A profit-and-loss column so that he could work out how much he could get for the place when the time came for him to fire-sell it, along with everything else.

Hadn’t she already tried to appeal to his better nature? Sexy as hell he might be, but when it came to the properties that were now his, the very properties he had ordered her not to bother talking about, any sign of a better nature was not in evidence.

It would take them the better part of forty-five minutes to get to the halfway house. On a clear day and a good run, it could be done in half that time from the house, but the going was slow in these conditions. She had every intention of laying it on thick, because this would be her one and only chance to have her say.

‘Julie Anne wasn’t living in the town when my mother lived here. I know that because she told me when we headed south from Alaska. A lot of her friends had left the place but some had stayed, had kids. My mum found out fast enough that Julie Anne had become something of a pillar of the community when she moved here.’

‘A pillar of the community. Touching.’

Kaya didn’t say anything but she could see from the clench of his jaw and the narrowing of his mouth that this was painful, and her heart went out to him. He was as tough as steel but underneath that armour there was more. She knew it. She’d seen it in the way he had been so gentle with her when she’d twisted her ankle.

His reaction gave her hope that maybe all wasn’t lost, at least not as lost as she’d thought.

‘My mum made friends with her quickly. We had a tiny little rented place in the centre above a shop. Julie Anne used to come to the shop quite a bit to buy stuff for the halfway house, odd bits and pieces. She and mum struck up a friendship of sorts. They reached an arrangement—I’m not sure how that came about but my mum...could be very persuasive. I ended up getting a babysitter without mum having to shell out. She could do her job and have her fun and there would be back-up when she wasn’t around.’

‘Very persuasive indeed. Is that why you go out of your way to be the opposite?’

But Kaya heard the teasing smile in his voice and, instead of bristling with offence, she felt a rush of warmth that made her skin prickle. She relaxed into her narrative. She’d never been this open before when it came to revealing her thoughts. She retraced her childhood, took side turns to describe stuff she’d kept to herself and built up a picture of the woman who had become so influential in her life.

Leo listened. In many ways, her childhood had been as tough as his. From everything she said, it seemed she’d skipped the business of having fun and had gone straight into the hard work of looking out for a mother who had been young, irresponsible and scattered when it came to men. She went for the wrong kind... She involved her daughter in the ups and downs of an erratic love life... She’d lost her husband, who had been the great love of her life, and had then proceeded to throw herself into years of futile distraction tactics in a vain attempt to replace him.

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