CHAPTER SIX
‘THERE’SACELIADREWto see you.’
It was not a call Leandro had expected to take three weeks after he returned to London.
He sat back in his swivel chair, surprising his PA by telling her to send up his unexpected visitor and to cancel his morning meetings until he told her otherwise.
He vaulted out of his chair and strolled to the bank of windows overlooking the dank, crowded streets several stories below. So, she’d had second thoughts. Maybe she had revisited his offer and decided that taking him up on it might not be such a bad idea after all. He perversely hoped so because he would then be able to tell her that it was now off the table.
Which it most decidedly was.
Leandro’s lips thinned at the unsavoury recollection of how their stint in Scotland had concluded.
A week living in a bubble. It had felt as though he had found himself inside one of those snow globes—shaken it and watched the white swirl of snowflakes covering everything for a few breathless, magical seconds.
He had gone to get a job done and had persuaded her to come because he’d needed her there. His objective had been simple—confront his runaway ex-fiancée, fill her in on what was happening with her father, remind her of the agreement they had reached to safeguard his financial future in a way that would salvage his pride, and to check out for himself what was going on with her mysterious lover who had bounced along and screwed everything up.
Simple.
Unfortunately, there had been no runaway ex-fiancée to confront and, instead, he had found himself trapped in his snow globe with a woman who had utterly bewitched him. For the first time in his life, well-laid plans had veered off-piste at dizzying speed.
Just thinking about it now made his teeth snap together with impatience and frustration.
He should have known that the temptation to touch would have been too much. He should have known because he’d sensed something intensely, sexually compelling about her from the very first minute he had clapped eyes on her.
She broke all the rules when it came to the sort of woman he tended to go out with. She had appealed to him on some weird level he hadn’t quite been able to understand and, maybe the second he’d clocked their isolation, he’d known that lurking in the safety of his office would not have been enough to kill off his very inconvenient attraction.
He’d wanted her and she’d wanted him and somehow he’d let her get under his skin.
The sex had been mind-blowing.
He’d stepped out of time, forgotten the rules and regulations that governed his uber-controlled life. Why? How had that happened? How had the walls he had constructed with such painstaking care been so easy to breach? And why on earth now did it feel so liberating?
Liberating enough for him to lose sight of the fact that what had happened between them had been a moment in time.
He had offered her more. When that snow had melted and the helicopter had signalled the return of normality, instead of shaking hands and sayingGoodbye...it’s been nice...look me up if you’re ever in the area...he’d asked her to carry on.
‘This isn’t over yet,’he’d husked, basking in the warm glow of post-coital satisfaction and knowing that she was as well.‘Why call it a day when we’re still hot for one another?’
It hadn’t crossed his mind that she would turn him down. Why would it have? She’d known the enticing benefits that came with dating him. He hadn’t needed to spell them out and front-row tickets to a fashion show had been just the tip of the iceberg.
And if she wasn’t interested in weekends at Lake Como or prime seats at the theatre or eating in the finest restaurants that money could buy? No problem. He would happily have ditched the lot, closed the front door and whiled away the hours between the sheets.
Still, it hadn’t troubled him when she’d very politely but very firmly thanked him for the kind offer and declined.
Now she was here.
Had she had second thoughts?
He wouldn’t blame her. She’d taken him up on the tickets to the fashion show. He knew that because he’d checked. Had that opened her eyes to what she might enjoy if she had a change of heart about his offer?
Or maybe she’d just realised that she still wanted him, plain and simple. Maybe she’d spent the past three weeks tossing and turning at night in bed, thinking about him and wishing that they were tossing and turning together.
It was galling for Leandro to think that he had laughed, shrugged...you win a few, you lose a few...and accepted rejection with nonchalance because, face it, there were plenty of other fish in the sea, only to find that she was still in his head three weeks later.
Leandro didn’t know how that computed but now that she was here, now that she had shown up out of the blue, he was feeling good for the first time since he’d locked the front door of his place in Scotland.
He was ready, waiting and half smiling as his dividing door was pushed open, as she was announced by his PA, at which point he spun round on his heel and headed back to the chair behind his impressive mahogany desk.