‘I want my wife back, Millie. In every sense of the word.’ His gaze was hard and direct. ‘No more headaches, no more “too tired”.’
‘What if I am too tired?’
‘I’ll wake you up.’ Leandro’s eyes gleamed dark with sexual intent. ‘I was very patient and gentle with you last time because I knew how inexperienced you were and I didn’t want to rush you. It was a mistake. A woman is never too tired for good sex. There was something else going on and I should have pushed you to tell me what it was.’
Millie’s stomach cramped and the rush of heat in her pelvis shocked her. ‘What are you saying? That this time you’re not going to be patient or gentle?’
‘That’s right,’ he said silkily, ‘I’m not. This time we’re going to have an adult sexual relationship. I look forward to introducing you to the pleasures of truly uninhibited sex. In full daylight.’
Her face turned scarlet. ‘You’re trying to shock me.’
‘No. But neither am I trying not to shock you, as I did before.’ His eyes lingered on her mouth. ‘You’re a very sexual woman but we barely explored the surface the first tim
e round. This time, it’s going to be different.’
‘It might not be! Perhaps I won’t find you attractive any more!’ The moment she said the words she realised how ridiculous they sounded and he obviously agreed because an ironic smile played around his mouth.
‘Do you want me to explore that statement further?’
‘No.’ Millie was grateful that she was holding the baby. ‘I don’t. I don’t want to talk about it at all.’
‘Well, tough, because from now on no subject is off limits.’ His mobile phone buzzed insistently and Leandro retrieved it from his pocket, registered the caller’s name and then looked at her face. ‘What?’
‘If I come back, I want you to switch off your phone when you’re with us,’ she said stiffly, ‘otherwise Costas will grow up feeling second best to a mobile network.’
Leandro gave her a long look and then rejected the call with an exaggerated stab of his finger. ‘Satisfied?’
Millie nodded, although she had no expectations that it would last. She really didn’t need to worry about saying yes to coming back, Millie thought bleakly, because he’d be working all the time. He always did. She’d barely see him.
‘I have one rule for our relationship,’ he purred, dropping the phone back into his pocket. ‘Just one.’
‘Go on.’
‘No matter what happens—you don’t run off. You don’t walk away from this marriage. You stay, no matter what.’
Millie licked her lips. ‘What if you’re the one who wants to run?’
‘That isn’t going to happen.’
‘It might do.’ She thought about everything that had happened to her and felt a lurch of unease. If things had been bad before, how much worse were they going to be this time around?
She was dreading the moment when he discovered the truth about what had happened to her.
Leandro wasn’t a man to couch his true feelings under a soft blanket of political correctness or sensitivity, was he? He’d say what he thought.
And she knew what he was going to think.
And it would be like hammering nails into raw flesh.
Millie rocked the baby, afraid that her emotional turbulence might somehow communicate itself to the sleeping child and disturb him.
‘I’ll allow you the rest of the day to think it over.’ Having delivered what he obviously considered to be a considerable compromise, Leandro strolled towards the door. ‘I have a meeting in Paris. Feel free to fire the nanny and choose someone else. I will be back by tonight and you will give me the answer I want to hear. And after that I will be switching off my mobile phone. And if you feel even a flicker of a headache, I suggest you take a painkiller because I won’t be allowing that as a valid excuse.’
CHAPTER FIVE
WHY had he allowed her time to think it over?
Surrounded by a room full of lawyers, Leandro drove the meeting at a furious pace, determined to close the deal that had been the main focus of his attention for six months. But he was aware that the timing was bad.