‘I broke my glass,’ Heather said, kneeling down so that she could begin carefully picking up the shards. ‘When you banged on the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone.’
‘You…paint?’
Heather looked briefly at him and blushed, suddenly feeling vulnerable as those flint-grey eyes roved over the artwork on her walls. ‘I told you that I had a job,’ she said, before resuming her glass-collecting task. It would take a heck of a lot more elbow grease to fully clean the ground, but the biggest bits had been collected; the elbow grease would have to wait until the morning, because right now she was finding it hard to think properly. She just wanted him out of her cottage so that she could get her scattered wits back into order.
Leo dragged his eyes away from the paintings and focused entirely on the woman standing in front of him. When she had told him that she had a job, he had assumed something along the lines of a secretary, maybe a receptionist somewhere, perhaps. But she was an artist, and it explained a lot. Her apparent lack of any recognisable fashion sense, her woolly-headed assumption that she could say whatever she wanted to say without thinking, her earnest belief that she could somehow solve a situation over a cup of tea and a good chat. Artists occupied a different world to most normal people. It was common knowledge they lived in a world of their own.
He refocused on the matter at hand. ‘I don’t know how you’ve managed to form such a strong bond with my son,’ he said, not beating about the bush. ‘But after the Sports Day…situation…it seems that the only way this weekend isn’t going to descend into a nightmare is if you…’ Leo searched around to find the right words. It wasn’t in his nature to ask favours of anyone, and having to do so now left a sour taste in his mouth. He especially didn’t like asking favours from a woman who got on his nerves. Moreover, he would have to be pleasant towards her.
Leo had tried his damnedest to form a bond with his son, but there was murky water under the bridge, and he had had time to reflect that it wasn’t Daniel’s fault. Without a great deal of difficulty, he could see any relationship he might have with his son sink without trace beneath a tide of remembered bitterness.
‘If I…what?’
‘Movies…lunch…dinner. I leave on Sunday afternoon,’ he felt compelled to tack on because he could see the dawning dismay spreading across her face.
‘You mean you want me to sacrifice my entire weekend to bail you out of a situation you can’t handle?’
‘Sacrifice?’ Leo laughed drily. ‘I don’t think there’s a woman alive who has ever seen a weekend spent in my company as a sacrifice.’
‘That’s the problem,’ Heather said. ‘Men like you never do.’
CHAPTER TWO
LEO decided to leave that half-muttered remark alone. Why get embroiled in a lengthy question-and-answer session with a woman who was an irrelevance in his life? On a more practical note, he needed her for the weekend, because he couldn’t face a day and a half of his son’s withdrawn sadness. If she could smooth things over, then far be it from him to invite further hostility from her. As far as he was concerned, though, all this interest in a kid who happened to live a couple of fields away from her spoke of an unhealthy lack of social life, but each to their own.
By lunchtime the following day—having spent the morning at the zoo, where his son had displayed an amazing knowledge of animals, rattling off facts to Heather and his mother while studiously ignoring him—Leo was beginning to feel his curiosity piqued.
She exuded warmth, and when she laughed, which she seemed to do often, it was a rich, infectious laughter.
Of course the laughter, like his son’s encyclopaediac knowledge of every animal, was not directed at him.
Over a cup of tea in the canteen at the zoo—which Leo could only describe as a marginally more savoury experience than if he had actually pulled his chair into one of the animal enclosures—he noticed that the woman was not strictly limited to conversations about dinosaurs, reptiles and computer games. When his mother asked him about work, in an attempt to include him in the conversation, Leo was taken aback to be quizzed about the politics of mergers and acquisitions in so far as they affected the lives of countless hapless victims of ‘marauding conglomerates’.
While his mother tried to hide her amusement, Leo stared at Heather as though she had mutated into one of the animals they had just been feeding.
Marauding conglomerates? Since when did country bumpkins use expressions like that?
He also didn’t like the way her mouth curled with scorn when she addressed him, but in front of his mother and Daniel there was nothing he could do but smile coldly at her and change the subject.
Now, with the animals out of the way, he was taking them all to lunch; that nasty little remark she had flung at him the evening before, the remark which he had generously chosen to overlook, was beginning to prey on his mind.
Just who the hell did the woman think she was? Did she imagine that because she was doing him a favour she could indulge in whatever cheap shot she wanted at his expense?
People rarely got under Leo’s skin. This particularly applied to women. He was astute when it came to reading their feminine wiles, and could see through any minor sulk to exactly what lay underneath. In short, they were a predictable entity.
As they headed for the Italian on the main street, he stuck his hands in his pockets and murmured, bending so that his words were for her ears only,
‘Artist and financial expert, hmm? A woman of many talents. I had no idea you had such a keen interest in the business world.’
Heather pulled back. Something about his warm breath against her face had made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle.
It had been a mistake to let him rattle her, and she had been unable to resist wiping that lazy, condescending expression off his face by parrying with him about finance. Against her will, she had once known those money markets until they were coming out of her ears—and, once learnt, always remembered. It had been worth it just to see the shocked look on his face when she’d thrown in a few technical terms that surely a country hick like her should never have known.
Now, with his gleaming eyes fixed on her, Heather was belatedly realising that she might have been better off keeping her mouth shut and letting him get on with thinking whatever he wanted to think of her.
‘I read the newspapers,’ she muttered stiffly.
‘You’d have to be a very avid reader of the Financial Times to know as much as you do about the global trading-market. So what’s going on here?’
‘Nothing’s going on, and can I just remind you that I don’t actually have to be here? I only agreed to come because I knew that Daniel would have been disappointed if I hadn’t—and he’s already had enough disappointment with you missing his Sports Day because of “unavoidable work commitments”.’
‘It’s not going to work, so you can forget it.’
‘What’s not going to work?’
‘Your attempt to change the subject. Who the hell are you really? That’s the question I can’t stop asking myself.’
Ahead of them, Daniel and Katherine were putting a bit of distance between them; when Katherine turned round and gesticulated that she and Daniel were going to pop into his favourite sports shop, Heather could have groaned with despair.
Leo was intrigued by her reaction to his remark. From not really caring one way or another who she was, he now seriously began to wonder about her provenance.
‘Are you always so suspicious?’
‘Comes with the territory.’
‘And what territory would that be? No, don’t bother answering that—I already know.’
‘Care to explain?’
‘No, not really. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go and see what Katherine and Daniel are up to in there.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they won’t mind if we go ahead to the restaurant and wait there for them. It’s a beautiful day. Why rush?’
‘Because I have things to do at the house.’
‘What things?’
‘None of your business!’
‘I’m getting the impression that you don’t like me very much. Would I be right in that assumption?’ He went into the sports shop to tell his mother that he would wait for them at the restaurant with Heather. No rush; take as long as they wanted. ‘But don’t buy anything.’ He looked at his son, who stared back at him with grudging curiosity. ‘I want to see whatever you buy—an athlete like you needs the best equipment.’ He was rewarded with something approaching a smile.
The sports shop was an Aladdin’s den. Leo reckoned his son could spend a satisfyingly long time browsing with his mother and that, he decided, would give him sufficient time to put his sudden curiosity to bed.
He had no doubt that she would be waiting for him outside. If there was one thing Leo knew with absolute certainty, it was that no one ever walked out on him until he was finished with them.
Sure enough, there she was, peering through the window of the shoe shop, and he took a little time to look at her. The strange gypsy-skirt of the night before had been replaced by something equally shapeless, but it was a hot day and her tee shirt outlined the contours of breasts that would be more than a handful. What would they look like? What would she feel like?