Page 16 of Bound By Her Baby Revelation (Hot Winter Escapes)

She’d wanted to open up his eyes to an uplifting vision of all the good work Julie Anne had spent her life doing. She’d wanted him to get past the annoying technicality of his abandonment and look beyond it, to the woman who had decided to seek atonement doing whatever it was she’d done, paving the way for young girls who needed shelter.

She’d wanted him to forgive and forget.

Never had he felt such a surge of bitterness as the old feelings he’d thought he’d laid to rest had returned with devastating force.

He’d had to leave.

Unaccustomed to any loss of control, the rush of emotions overwhelming him, threatening to take him back to a dark place he’d left behind, had been too much. But, even as he’d fought against the snow to make his way into town, with the silence of the night a calming companion, he’d recognised that the woman hadn’t said any of the things to rile him.

More than that, he’d been forced to concede that he wasn’t the only one with unresolved issues on the subject of his mother.

Yes, he’d had years living with what she’d done, but she’d also seemed to have done a number on Kaya, a person who had loved and trusted her. She’d kept him a secret—surely that would eat away at the memories she had of her friend? Yet, somehow, she had transcended any disappointment or disillusionment and had been determined to give Julie Anne the benefit of the doubt.

He, on the other hand, could not be quite so forgiving.

He’d been glad of the arduous, freezing walk, which had calmed him, and he’d found the café without any trouble. By the time he’d reached civilisation, he’d been more than happy to ditch the work he had resolved to do and immerse himself in the sort of superficial laughter and bonhomie that came as second nature to him.

That he could handle. It was easy to weave that magnetic spell over people, easy to join in, seemingly charming and mesmerising while deep inside he held himself back, always watching from the outside, participating but only so much and no more.

With Kaya and her questions and searching dark eyes...? Well, it seemed ridiculously difficult and he wondered whether it was because of a connection throbbing between them, one he hadn’t instigated but one that was there nevertheless.

The connection of his mother.

Kaya made a mockery of his self-control and that, as much as anything else, he had wanted to escape.

But he hadn’t expected to look through those panes of glass out into a lamp-lit street to see her standing there looking, it had to be said, livid.

The sharp satisfaction he had felt the minute he had spotted her defied common sense. Just like that, earlier frustrations vanished and his equanimity returned, stabilising him and bringing a small smile to his lips as he joined her outside in the freezing cold.

‘This is unexpected,’ he drawled. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Next to Kaya, scowling and glaring, all those attractive young women he had just been chatting with faded into oblivion.

Under the street lamps, her exotic beauty was thrown into sharp relief. He felt a kick of sexual awareness and drew in a sharp breath.

‘You were gone for hours,’ Kaya said through gritted teeth, stalking towards her car, not sparing him a glance and absolutely regretting every guilt-ridden twinge that had propelled her into getting behind the wheel to seek him out.

When she thought of the way she had anxiously peered left and right, scouring the vergesjust in case, only to spot him flirting away with a bunch of women in the café, she wanted to grind her teeth in frustration.

‘My apologies if you were worried.’

‘Who said anything about being worried?’

As she yanked open the car door, he could see the tinge of colour in her cheeks. She tugged her hair and he noted the slight trembling of her fingers. And she wasstillstudiously avoiding his eyes.

Because...what?

Because she wasawareof him? Because underneath her annoyance she was as aware of him on a basic, primal level as he was of her?

Leo didn’t get it. This wave of incomprehensible attraction he felt when he was near her was so unusual for him.

Was it down to the extraordinary nature of their meeting? Or was it because she was just so different from the sort of women he went out with, dated and slept with? She demanded, she ignored his barriers, she challenged him and then stuck to her guns even when he signalled to her to back off. He shouldn’t have found any of that alluring but, against all odds, he did.

Was it the pull of novelty? The truth was that he had never sought out a woman like Kaya. He wasn’t and never had been interested in cultivating long-term relationships with anyone. He didn’t do love because he didn’t believe in it. What examples had he ever had of a loving relationship? His own flesh and blood had not been able to love him and surely that should be love in its purest form? Surely that should be love that lacked self-concern, the most selfless love of all? And if he had never experienced that, if that had been too tough for a couple of feckless parents to master, then what hope for the complicated, gruelling business of love that was based on attraction, hope and belief in fairy-tale nonsense about happy-ever-afters?

No; in his head, love was pain and loss and in ways that he couldn’t put his finger on. He had come to accept that it was an emotion he would never allow himself to feel.

So, if he went for relationships that were transitory and superficial, then that was just fine with him because he wasn’t interested in anything beyond that.

Part of him acknowledged that in going for a certain type of woman, for laying down boundaries that he insisted be adhered to, he was taking the route he knew to be safe, the route that would protect his heart.

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