‘It doesn’t matter how you wrap it up, that’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it? Or we could go upstairs to the bedroom. Might last a bit longer there.’ She thought of them together on her king-sized bed with its floral duvet; she thought of the floral duvet being kicked off in the heat of the moment and shakily closed the door on the image. It was way too easy for her imagination to break its reins and run rampant.
‘Why don’t you let me show you? You can tell me afterwards whether you have any complaints. I guarantee you won’t.’
‘Because you’re so sure of yourself?’
‘Correct.’
‘Conceited, aren’t you?’
‘Not conceited. I just don’t see the point of hiding behind false modesty.’
Two patches of bright colour had appeared on her cheeks, and the hand wrapped round the mug was trembling. She set the mug down and clasped her hands together on her lap out of sight. The atmosphere between them sizzled like a live wire. She had expected him to be enraged by her slurs on his skills as a lover, and was now disproportionately shaken by the fact that he hadn’t been.
‘And then, after we’ve made love, what happens next? You return to London, feeling refreshed? Just out of interest, do you return to London to share your fabulous love-making skills with another woman? Maybe more than one?’
‘Do you want a fight, Heather? Is that it?’
‘I’m just curious.’
‘Well, to satisfy your curiosity, I don’t happen to be involved with anyone else at the moment, and in case you’re not getting the message loud and clear I don’t spread myself thin when it comes to women. The idea of having a harem of women on the go is repugnant.’
‘So what does happen, in that case—after today?’
‘Is that what’s worrying you? You think that you might be a one-night stand? Well, let me put your mind to rest on that score—I don’t do one-night stands. I don’t do flocks of women because they happen to be available. I have a libido but I also have self-control.’
‘But you don’t do permanence, either.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘And how have all those women you’ve dated felt about that? Have they all conveniently shared your aversion to taking the plunge?’ Like a dog with a bone, she was finding it difficult to let it go. She wanted him gone, but she didn’t. She wanted to tell him her point of view, but she couldn’t curb her desire to hear his. She hated her curiosity, but it was like an itch that needed to be scratched. She was desperate to get her anger to boiling point, because she would really have liked to despise him, but little pieces of him that didn’t fit in with the stereotype kept sabotaging all her efforts, and her body was betraying her mind and ambushing her good intentions.
‘I make it clear from the outset that a wedding ring isn’t part of the agenda. If some of them have nursed any hopes in that direction, then they haven’t said. I don’t go out with women who throw hissy fits if they think they’ve been let down, and I don’t go out with women who think that marriage is the inevitable conclusion to a relationship. Does that answer your question?’
‘So all’s fair in love and war?’
‘Get to the point, Heather.’ The tepid coffee was now stone cold. Leo pushed it aside and looked at her. Having dived into the water, he was only now realising that there were icebergs under the surface. He’d never had to put this amount of effort into a woman before, he thought ill-temperedly.
‘The point is…’ There was a jumble of words in her head and she was temporarily silenced as she tried to sift through them, find the words that were important and discard the ones that weren’t.
She could feel his cool, watchful eyes on her and she wished that she could read what he was thinking. Why did he have to be so damned complex? Why couldn’t he have done her the favour of just fitting into the handy box in her head?
‘The point is…’ She stood up awkwardly. ‘Look, I can’t have this type of conversation here.’
‘Oh, but I thought the kitchen was the best bet.’
‘If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, then that’s fine. You know where the door is.’
‘Oh, don’t think you’re going to get off that easily,’ Leo grated. ‘I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.’
He followed her into the sitting room where she proceeded to stand by the window, hugging herself and keeping as far away from him as possible. Outbursts and melodrama were two things he had no time for, but for some reason wild horses wouldn’t have dragged him away from whatever lame story was about to unfold. If this was some kind of ruse to inveigle him into making promises he would inevitably fail to keep, however sexy her body was, then she was barking up the wrong tree, and he would enjoy telling her so in no uncertain terms. He should have guessed that she was all about flowers, chocolate and romance. He should have guessed it from the home-spun furnishings and the picture-postcard garden. She didn’t know how the real world worked, but how could she, caught up in her own imaginary world of illustration, living in the middle of the countryside where life evolved at such a slower pace?
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Heather said, starting somewhere in the middle, ‘whether you fancy me or I fancy you.’
‘And why would that be? I’m all ears. Because there’s a higher plane somewhere? Some spiritual nirvana we should all be aiming for?’ He had sat down on the sofa, legs crossed. She had switched on a couple of lamps and the room was bathed in a warm, mellow glow. The shadows made her look all the softer, more vulnerable, more unbearably feminine. He looked past her to the mantelpiece, which was cluttered with pictures in various size of frame. A hallmark of the incurable romantic, he thought cynically. There was no mantelpiece in his penthouse apartment and, if there had been, it certainly wouldn’t have been groaning under the weight of photos.
‘Because I used to be married!’ There. It was out in the open now, and the silence that greeted her revelation was deafening. She could almost sense Leo’s brutally sharp mind trying and failing to take it in.
‘You were married?’ he asked. He didn’t know why he found that so shocking, but he did.
‘To a man called Brian.’ Having intended to leave out all extraneous detail, Heather was now overcome with the urge to divulge every miserable second of her disillusioning experience. ‘I…We were…I suppose you could say that we were childhood sweethearts. Went to the same secondary school, started going out when I was seventeen and he was eighteen, although we’d known each other long before then. Grew up together, you might say.’
Leo had said, in a voice that had been thick with sarcasm, that he was going to be all ears, that he couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say. He hadn’t expected this.
‘You were married,’ he repeated slowly.
‘Yes. Haven’t I just told you that?’
‘I’m finding it hard to take in.’
‘Why?’ Because, she thought, he didn’t think she really had what it took to get a guy for keeps? ‘No, scrap that.’
‘Because a husband isn’t usually something most women keep to themselves, even husbands who are no longer on the scene.’ He didn’t add that most divorced women were fond of getting the sympathy vote and complaining about husbands who had left them high and dry—or maybe that was just his cynicism speaking, having been out with a couple of divorcees in the past, neither of which had lasted longer than three months apiece. Who wanted to spend what little free time they had listening to a woman ranting about her ex? ‘Where is he now?’ Leo asked.
He was already envisaging the type of guy she might have married, working out why she was so keen on fighting him. Once bitten, twice shy.
‘In Hong Kong, as a matter of fact.’
‘Hong Kong? What the hell is your ex-husband doing in Hong Kong?’
‘You’re amazed that I was married. You’re amazed that my ex-husband lives in Hong Kong. You don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?’ Heather asked coldly, although there were tears just below the surface. She was remembering how she had failed to fit in to city life. The higher Brian had climbed, the more she had been left behind. She just hadn’t been the right sort of woman. Why on earth was she feeling hurt because Leo was finding it hard to believe that she might ever have had a life outside the country cottage and the gardening interests?
‘It has nothing to do with whether or not I have a high opinion of you.’ Married? Hong Kong? He had managed to swallow his stupefaction that the woman had an ex in tow; had rapidly concluded that the hapless guy, the teenage sweetheart, must have been a country lad, had done whatever country lads did for a living—sheep farming, possibly—Heather would have become bored with him, with the monotony of being a farmer’s wife…The familiar story of two lives drifting apart.
Sheep farmers, however, did not usually emigrate to Hong Kong.
‘You portrayed yourself in a certain light,’ Leo told her evenly. ‘I took you at face value. You never once mentioned that you were married. You don’t wear a wedding ring. Believe it or not, my immediate conclusion wasn’t that you were a divorcee. Get where I’m going with this? If you can find the insult there, then please point it out.’