She was retrospectively incredulous that she had succumbed to his phoney, soft voice and honeyed words and had actually believed that he had come to some kind of wondrous realisation. She couldn’t now comprehend how she had been so stupid. The man didn’t love her, never had and never would. Really, how on earth could he have come to a wondrous conclusion that he had made a mistake, that he wanted her in his life? Even when he had uttered that preposterous proposal he had significantly failed to say anything about love. She had let herself believe what she’d wanted to believe, and it wouldn’t be the first time she had made that particular mistake around him.
‘We need to talk,’ she told him in a stilted voice, solving the problem of looking at him by turning her back and walking towards her sitting room. She waited as he followed her in, but when he sat down, patting the space next to him, she remained standing by the door until he finally caught her mood and frowned.
‘You are upset because I should have come sooner,’ he said as an apology. ‘There were things that needed to be said between my brother and myself.’
‘Yes. I know.’ Heather swallowed hard. She was so alive to his presence that it hurt. It was like being high up on a mountain where the air was thin and breathing normally was impossible. It was not how she wanted to feel, not now, and she had to make a big effort to keep her voice level and her thoughts as clear as possible.
‘Sometimes,’ he carried on, ‘family situations can take longer than anticipated.’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘Is that all you’re going to say? And why are you standing all the way over there by the door when there’s a much more comfortable spot right here next to me?’ Where you belong, was the unvoiced postscript to that remark, and incredibly he didn’t try and rail against it.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said, Leo—about marriage—and it doesn’t make any sense.’
Leo’s deep, grey eyes, which could be as cold as slate when he was angry and as dark as coal when he was aroused, swept over her cautiously.
‘You see,’ Heather continued, pushing herself away from the door and sidling sideways, crablike, to collapse onto the chair facing him. ‘I happened to overhear a bit of what you and Alex were talking about.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘I came back; I thought the two of you might want some coffee. The door was open and I heard…stuff.’ The ‘stuff’ had become a jumble of words that had crystallised into a lethally destructive bomb threatening to explode in her head.
‘Stuff that made me realise that you don’t give a jot about me,’ Heather told him. She was hanging on to her self-control, but only by a thread, and if he couldn’t hear the angry tremor in her voice then she certainly could. ‘You didn’t ask me to marry you because you had decided that you wanted to build a future with me. You asked me to marry you because Alex was in the room and you felt the need to exercise your rights over a possession. Because there’s a lot of muddy water under your bridge, isn’t there, Leo? Would you ever have told me if I hadn’t found out on my own?’
‘You should not have stood out there listening to a conversation that was private!’ Even as the words left his mouth, Leo was chillingly aware that there were more holes in that line of argument than a colander. Of course she would have listened, probably caught by the mention of her name, or maybe just by the urgency of their voices. She was only human. He felt out of control, and he didn’t like it, but then again when had he felt completely in control since he had met her? He could no longer remember that happy state, nor did he have any inclination to return to it.
‘That’s not the point. The point is…’ She heard the wobble in her voice and took a deep breath. ‘I was just a bit player in a revenge game for you, Leo.’ Big, fat tears were welling up and she swallowed hard.
‘You’re getting hysterical.’
‘I am not getting hysterical!’
‘No? Because your voice is getting higher and higher. Why don’t you let me explain?’ A lifetime of self-control made it possible for Leo to outwardly contain all nuance of emotion in his voice, but already he was considering the possibility that one overheard conversation would be the conclusive nail in his coffin, and a thread of panic was beginning to filter in. He wanted to go over to her, close the distance between them, but he knew instinctively that the result would be either fight or flight, and neither was acceptable.
‘Explain what?’ Heather asked him jerkily. ‘How it is that you let your ex-wife destroy the relationship you had with your brother? With your son?’
The silence stretched between them, thick and tense. Heather wondered whether he would say anything. He was a deeply private man, and having her raise the spectre of a past he probably would have preferred to keep under wraps, she half-figured, would make him simply stand up and walk away.
Leo heard the scathing, incredulous criticism in her voice and for the first time in his life he found himself lost for words. The very basic foundation of his life—which was that essentially he didn’t much care one way or another what someone else might think of him—deserted him.
‘What you overheard has nothing to do with you.’
‘How can you say that?’ Heather asked. She stared at the man sitting opposite her and wondered who he was. There was no expression on his face. He wasn’t going to explain anything to her because she just didn’t matter enough. Since when should that thought hurt her? she wondered. It wasn’t as though it came as any blinding surprise.
Since when had she ever really mattered to him? Even when he had been covering her body with kisses, touching her in her most intimate places, tasting her in ways that could send her into orbit, he had never let the barriers down. He lived life the way people might play a game of chess, always coolly conscious of needing to make just the right move. Wasn’t that why he was so phenomenally successful in business? Leo did nothing unless it suited him. At that particular point in time, it had suited him to make a big song and dance of claiming her in the most irrefutable way he could think of.
‘Alex and I were having a private conversation,’ Leo said heavily. ‘And one that was perhaps overdue.’
‘ Perhaps?’
‘Sophia destroyed many things, and I allowed it.’ For someone as open and as upfront as she was, she would find these dark secrets abhorrent. But he needed to explain before he could even begin to find out whether he had missed his chance with her, as he knew he probably had. ‘I never questioned what she expected out of me, but I knew very early on that I was failing to deliver—too much time spent at work, not enough interest in going out to clubs or partying. My wife, in short, discovered that the man she married wasn’t the funloving guy she wanted. It escaped her that I needed to work in order to earn the vast sums of money she enjoyed spending.’
‘You don’t have to tell me any of this if you don’t want to,’ Heather said. She was painfully aware that the words were wrenched out of him. While he maybe thought that the very least she deserved was clarification from his point of view, of things that had been said, she still shied away from causing him any discomfort. She could feel her tender heart reaching out to him.
Leo looked briefly at her and then vaulted to his feet so that he could pace the small room, a tiger forced to withdraw its claws and leash its primitive urge to dominate. Which made her no less conscious of his immense, restless energy. Even in thoughtful contemplation he still managed to overwhelm his surroundings and make her acutely aware of her fascinated response to his physical impact.
In that single sentence—you don’t have to tell me any of this if you don’t want to—Leo thought that he could identify her retreat from him. Why else would she show such little interest in a story that was so revealingly intimate? He hadn’t thought that he had loved her. Hell, who knew what love was? His experiences in that field had been blighted, to say the least. How was he supposed to know, belatedly, that this powerful urge to be with her, the way she had filled his head, had been more than just a passing inconvenience? He had never had a problem compartmentalising women before. How was he supposed to recognise that his inability to do the same with this woman was an indication of feelings that were as alien to him as breathing air was to a fish?
He gave an elegant, casual shrug in the hope that it would conceal his desperation to make her understand.
‘I don’t pretend to have been a saint. I was away more often than I should have been, but returning to the house was like returning to a hell hole. Even after Daniel was born the arguments continued. In fact, they became worse, because added to the general gripe that I didn’t pay her the attention she deserved was her resentment at being housebound. Even with nannies at her disposal her freedom of movement was curtailed, by her standards, and she didn’t like it.’
Having heard only the bare skeleton of her eavesdropped conversation, Heather was silent at this unexpected fleshing out of the detail.
‘Well?’ Leo prompted, because her silence was unnerving. She was a woman who had opinions on just about everything, up to and including things which were outside the boundaries which he had silently but firmly laid down between them.