Page 10 of Bound By Her Baby Revelation (Hot Winter Escapes)

‘I got rudimentary information,’ Leo said on a sigh. ‘I didn’t get a book with chapters and paragraphs.’

‘Well,’ Kaya said stoutly, ‘If you’ll let me explain—’

‘Right now, I don’t think I can stand another round of chit chat about a woman I didn’t know from Adam.’

He stood up and moved to the window to look outside at sky that remained ominously dark as it continued to shed its burden of thick, white snow across an alien landscape.

It snowed in Manhattan—the winters could be as brutal as this—but there was an essential difference. In Manhattan, the streets and roads were cleared because people had to get to work. The glass towers remained open for business. Broadband continued to do its thing so communications weren’t brought to a crashing stop because of the weather. And from his penthouse apartment, with its far-reaching three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views, he could survey the city he felt he owned with a drink in his hand, knowing that the weather would seldom prove too much of an inconvenience.

He spun round to look at her.

‘The Internet’s down.’

‘Is it?’ Kaya frowned and was momentarily disconcerted by the abrupt change of topic, but then why should she be surprised if he didn’t want to dwell on anything she had to say? ‘I don’t suppose it’s that surprising. Look at what’s happening outside.’

‘Some snow,’ Leo remarked wryly. ‘It’s hardly Armageddon. It snows in New York as well, believe it or not, and yet against all odds the Internet keeps working.’

‘The Internet will be up and running in the town,’ Kaya told him. ‘Out here, it tends to be a little more erratic when the weather’s like this.’

Leo looked at her and for the first time wondered what the hell a young woman like the one glaring at him, a young and incredibly striking young woman, was doing here holed up in a house she didn’t own. Weren’t bright lights beckoning? Was there a boyfriend on the scene? Some significant other tying her to a place anyone might have thought she would have left a long time ago? Especially considering her mother had upped sticks and moved halfway across the world.

She was asking him about New York, as though curiosity had staged a battle against hostile silence and lost, and for the first time he felt a flare of amusement.

It was satisfying to know that he wasn’t the only one who was curious. Where he lived was no big secret. She could look him up on the Internet and find out pretty fast that he was rich beyond words and lived in the centre of Manhattan in an apartment in the most prestigious post code. It was no big deal to tell her about his place as he compared it to the house in which he now found himself.

‘I enjoy city life,’ he murmured. ‘I like looking out my floor-to-ceiling windows and observing what’s going on down below—the hustle and the bustle, a living, breathing city alive with possibilities. I don’t find it claustrophobic. Now this?’ He nodded to his surroundings without taking his eyes off her face. ‘ThisI find claustrophobic, which leads me to wonder how it is that you don’t as well.’

How had he done that? Kaya wondered. How had he managed to reveal nothing about himself, really, while steering the conversation neatly in her direction, asking a question that was flagrantly nosy under the pretext of expressing the sort of anodyne interestshehad expressed?

How had he made her suddenly think about her life and the paths she had chosen to take? Had she planned to stay put after her mother had disappeared to New Zealand? Or had she simply followed the path of least resistance, liking the peace of being grounded after a lifetime being the grown-up and practically taking care of her mother, who had treated her more as a pal than a daughter?

She had settled into a routine, especially after she had moved in with Julie Anne. She had relished normality and perhaps even found a place in life where, for once, she had someone she looked on as a mother figure, for Julie Anne had been far more of a mother to her than her own had ever been.

It had been easy to drift along without having to make any monumental decisions. And when it came to men...

Had it been easier from that point of view as well? Had it been easier just to stick with what she knew—guys she had more or less grown up with? A crowd she was comfortable in? Had it been easier just to delay the whole business of dealing with her singledom? No one had come along who fitted the bill and that had been fine.

Leo’s blunt question dredged all this up and she wished she hadn’t opened the door to his curiosity.

As if to remind her of their confinement, she saw the snow through the window and shivered.

How long were they going to be cooped up here? Surely they couldn’t tiptoe around one another indefinitely? She would have to use their enforced captivity to at least try and get him to see another point of view, to have some insight into the inheritance he had unexpectedly come into, but how?

Kaya shivered. When she looked at him, she could feel hot colour creeping into her cheeks, depriving her of her ability to talk, sucking the oxygen from the air and leaving her hot and bothered.

The last thing she wanted was to get into some kind of confession mode with this guy, yet there was a dangerous charisma about him that she found difficult to deal with.

‘I mean,’ he drawled lazily, ‘Maybe there’s someone else here pinning you down?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Kaya blinked and surfaced from her meandering, uncomfortable thoughts.

‘Well...’ he spread his hands wide ‘...your mother’s left for the opposite side of the world, so I guess you would have been free to get out of here and explore what else was on offer. Unless, of course, there’s a boyfriend somewhere in the background keeping you tied to the kitchen sink, so to speak? Why else would you bury yourself out here, in the middle of nowhere with only an old woman for company?’

Kaya gasped because she found every single word he had just said offensive but, when she opened her mouth to tell him exactly what she thought of his commentary on her life, he burst out laughing.

‘My apologies,’ he said, although he was still grinning, ‘I’m not that much of a dinosaur to think that the role of any woman is tied to a kitchen sink...but my curiosity was genuine. What has kept you here?’

And just like that Kaya realised that he was the first person ever to have posed that question. Not even her mother had asked her and neither had Julie Anne nor any of her friends. None had ever wondered out loud how it was that she had decided to stay put when she had all the qualifications to forge a different, more adventurous life for herself somewhere else.

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