Page 49 of Bound By Her Baby Revelation (Hot Winter Escapes)

She was only saying what he had said to her in the first place. She’d come round to his way of thinking. Theresponsibleway of thinking.

‘Kaya,’ he said huskily, ‘I...’

I love you?Leo froze. He didn’t know where that had come from. He couldn’t love her. He couldn’tlove. His heart thudded, protesting that assumption.

‘You what...?’

‘You’re doing the right thing.’

Love?He found it hard to think straight and he knew he had to get past this crazy nonsense and focus on the here and now. She was going to marry him. They were doing the thing that made sense, the thing that was best for their child. Children didn’t ask to be born and should never have to pay the price for mistakes their parents had made.

They would have that thought guiding them and they would have sex. The physical side of things, he could understand, and that thought calmed him.

‘I’m just doing what you’re doing, Leo. I’m making sacrifices. You’re prepared to move to Boston and I know that’ll probably be a huge wrench for you.’

The sun was beating down on them and the rug felt hot, even under the shade of the tree with its low-hanging branches.

The sound of the sea, gentle against the shore, was soporific.

Leo stared into her eyes and had trouble swallowing. She was everything to him. He was the sacrifice she was forced to make. Sex and a baby would be their bond.

He’d lived his life with sex as the only thing he could offer a woman but, now he wanted to offer so much more, he was with a woman who wanted it all but from another man.

She would give everything up, including the place she called home, so that she could do the right thing. And that was what he had persuaded her to do by presenting her with facts, figures and scenarios that he’d known would unsettle her. He’d set his mind on something and had used every trick in the book to get what he’d wanted.

He hadn’t bothered to dig deeper into things that should have unsettledhim: why he’d missed her so much; why his heart turned over when he thought of her; why spending the rest of his life with her had been a decision he’d reached without batting an eye, baby or no baby.

She was talking about Boston, building herself up to a move, and sounding cheerful about it.

He interrupted her mid-sentence. He could take what she was offering, touch her soft mouth, make love to her and feel her body moulding to hers.

‘Kaya...’

She smiled but his eyes were grave when he looked at her.

‘This time, it’s for me to apologise. It’s not going to work.’

‘What?’ She was still smiling.

‘Marriage. You were right—it’s not for us. Boston, yes, that makes sense. But marriage? No. We have to let that one go.’

CHAPTER TEN

BOSTON...MARRIAGE...THEsort of picture-perfect gingerbread cottage he had always scorned:thatwas what was on Leo’s mind ten days later as he stared out of the vast expanse of glass that separated him from the busy Manhattan streets below.

He could have had it all. He could have had the woman he’d fallen in love with. He could have just accepted that the circumstances weren’t ideal and he was now plagued by what he had given up.

If things had been bad for him before he’d gone to his villa in the Bahamas, then they were indescribable now. He ached from the sorrow of knowing what he couldn’t have and from the vague notion that he had brought the whole situation about all by himself.

He’d been arrogant and smug. He had slept with Kaya and managed to convince himself that he was untouchable because he always had been. He’d known the kind of guy she wanted but, instead of showing her from the start that he was that guy, when he scraped away the superficial stuff he had glibly shrugged and assumed that the sort of considerate man she was after, the sort of man who made dreams come true for women and wanted a future with them, wasn’t him.

He hadn’t spotted love for what it was until it was too late. He couldn’t blame himself for that but he did blame himself for misreading the signposts along the way.

Now she was gone. Not to Boston, not to house-hunt with him, even though he had done his best to try and convince her to, but back to Vancouver to think things through.

He hadn’t had a leg to stand on so he had been forced to let her go. The last day they’d spent in the Bahamas had been agony for him but he had concealed it well.

And her? She had carried on smiling, not once berating him for stringing her along, and not once implying that she had known best all along. She had been sweet, quiet and well-mannered and, in return, he’d backed away and fought against the pain of watching her and seeing her leave him.

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