They fired her up into a burning anger that matched his. What gave him the right to lay into her? They hadn’t just broken up. He had rid himself of her the way someone would rid themselves of vermin. He had dispatched her as a criminal and a liar and now had the barefaced nerve to accuse her of lacking the decency to tell him that she had been pregnant!
‘Start as you mean to go on’ was the saying that sprang to mind, and Abigail suspected that, if she started by lying down and becoming a doormat he felt free to walk all over, then that would be her role forever, whatever joint way forward they finally found.
‘I wasn’t exactly filled with confidence that, if I threw myself at your feet and told you that I was pregnant, you wouldn’t do your best to hurt me for all that stuff you’d been told by your sister!’
‘The truth, you mean?’
‘There you go! It was over three months after we broke up before I even found out that I was pregnant. I was so anxious about my future, so desperate to get a job, so worried about where I would end up living because all my savings were running out, that I didn’t even notice that my periods had stopped! And, yes, I suppose I could have come running to you for help, but guess what? When you’re accused of being a liar and a thief and a gold-digger, the last thing that occurs to you in a moment of blind panic is to turn to your accuser for help.’
‘I wasn’t just a random ex-boyfriend.’ Leandro wasn’t going to let her get away with that, ‘I was the man who’d fathered the child you were carrying.’
He sighed with frustrated impatience and bit down hard on the bitter recriminations that begged to find a way out. They would be at his apartment in under five minutes. He’d drawn the partition and his driver couldn’t hear a word they were saying but he still felt that he needed her somewhere entirely private in which to have this life-changing conversation. The back of a car just wasn’t working for him.
‘I told you,’ Abigail reminded him in a driven voice, ‘I was scared. Scared that you would try and take him away from me—that I would never be able to fight you, because you’re rich and powerful, and at the time I was jobless and virtually unemployable, thanks to that scumbag of an ex-boss who’d lied about me.’
‘What makes you think that I won’t try and do that now?’ Leandro asked.
Abigail froze and looked at him with horror. ‘You wouldn’t dare!’
‘It’s always a mistake to lay down a challenge to a man like me.’ Leandro let the silence stretch between them, interminably long. Why not let her imagination go wild? It was the very least she deserved, as far as he was concerned.
‘We’re here. We can continue this conversation inside.’
Abigail, who could hardly think for the blind panic racing through her, and the worst-case scenarios filling her head, glanced distractedly at the elegant white building in front of which the car was slowing. Precise, black wrought-iron railings enhanced the windows, which were perfectly spaced and perfectly rectangular—like a child’s drawing of what the outside of a house should look like, with all the dimensions of ruler-like precision. They entered a large hallway, tiled in original Victorian tiles, and were whooshed up in silence in the lift to his apartment, which she found extended over two floors and was as big as a house.
It was all white, aside from the dramatic, abstract works of art on the walls. The floor was blonde wood. There were no curtains at all, just shutters. The staircase that wound up to a galleried landing was the least child-friendly item of house décor she had ever seen in her entire life. Metal and with a token safety railing that would encourage any adventurous toddler to fall under. She was horrified.
Leandro was watching her carefully, and he frowned, because his apartment never failed to impress. He’d employed the best interior designer in London who had sourced materials from across Europe to create the perfect place. No expense had been spared and that was obvious, from the rich grey granite in the open-plan kitchen, to the pale wood on the floor which had been specially flown in from The Netherlands at great cost. Half of the paintings were by iconic and recognisable artists, the other half were investment pieces by up-and-coming artists, and their value increased weekly. The furniture was all bespoke.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked irritably and Abigail swivelled round to look at him, her hands belligerently folded.
‘I hate this apartment,’ she said bluntly, spreading one arm wide in a gesture of dismissal that got on his nerves.
‘Don’t be crazy. Of course you don’t. No one hates this apartment.’
‘It’s...it’s...soulless...cold. A mausoleum would have more atmosphere!’
Leandro glowered and remembered that she had never been shy about speaking her mind. In fact, she’d been the only woman in living memory ever to have disagreed with him about anything and he’d enjoyed it. She’d always been magnificent when she was arguing. She looked bloody magnificent now. He stared at her in brooding silence, noting the hectic flush in her cheeks, the pinkness of her full mouth and the fiery glitter in her bright green eyes.
Faster than a speeding bullet, his body responded to her with shocking enthusiasm. He hardened and his desire increased. Disgusted with himself, Leandro turned away and headed for one of the cream sofas artfully arranged around the only rug in the apartment, a grey hand-woven affair with a bold white, abstract pattern.
‘Speaking of residences,’ he told her coldly, ‘let’s move away from the shocking condition of mine and let’s talk about yours. When you were thinking about yourself and making your far-reaching decision to exclude me from my son’s life, did you ever stop to think that he might have benefited from the financial support I would have been able to give? That, instead of condemning him to a house the size of a matchbox, his life may very well have been improved by being somewhere bigger? Understood, at the age of ten months it’s not that urgent, but what when he begins to crawl? To walk around? Were you so busy being selfish that you managed to happily justify denying him all the advantages my money could have brought to the situation?’
Abigail flushed, dismayed at being labelled selfish, yet seeing it from his point of view and not at all liking the picture he was painting of her.
‘And what about,’ Leandro continued mercilessly, ‘when my son got old enough to start wondering where his father was?’
‘Stop referring to Sam as your son. He’s our son.’ Warmth spread through her because, unwittingly, she had joined them up, voiced what she had denied for the past year and a half: that she wasn’t the only parent involved in this equation. She’d pretended that she was, but that was no longer the case, and she thought uneasily that perhaps it shouldn’t have been the case at all. Not that she was going to start apologising for anything.
Leandro didn’t miss that slip of the tongue and was quietly pleased because it showed that she was no longer fighting him. It didn’t make it any easier to stomach what she had done but, in truth, he could almost see her point of view. He had walked away without giving her the chance to defend herself. He had taken his sister at her word and had refused to see that the woman he’d been sleeping with, the woman he’d felt he’d known, might have had her reasons for not being quite as open with him as she could have been. He’d reached conclusions and he had thrown those conclusions at her and, yes, they’d pretty much added up to her being a thief, a liar and, by extension, a gold-digger.
Well, if time had proved one thing, it was this. She was no gold-digger or else she would have landed on his doorstep within seconds of finding out that she was pregnant. She wouldn’t have avoided him, she would actively have sought him out, because—he had to face it—she would have been holding the ultimate trump card.
She was telling the truth when she said that she’d been scared and he knew why—because he was ruthless. She’d been terrified of him trying to take her child away from her, and she’d had good cause to be apprehensive bec
ause of the way they’d broken up. And not just that, he was forced to concede with searing honesty—he had always made it clear to her that he wasn’t interested in commitment, even though he had come uncomfortably close to revising that decision during the time he’d been with her. He grudgingly admitted to himself for the first time that this was possibly why he had rushed to believe Cecilia, but had rushed to break off the relationship with Abigail, a relationship that had come way too close to challenging his long-held beliefs.
He thought of her alone—scared, broke and dealing with a momentous situation on her own.
Had there even been anyone by her side when she’d delivered Sam? Or had she got herself off to hospital on her own?
‘I did think about what might happen when Sam was old enough to start being curious,’ Abigail muttered uncomfortably.
‘And what conclusions had you come to?’ Disconcerted by the introspective route his thoughts had taken him, Leandro’s tone was sharper and cooler than he’d intended. ‘Had you decided that you’d write off my existence on a permanent basis to make life easier for you? “Lost at sea” or something like that?’
‘No!’ Abigail was horrified that he could come to such a conclusion. Was he being serious? ‘I would never, ever have done anything like that!’ She found that she couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to him. Indeed, she felt physically ill at the thought.
His tone softened at the distraught expression on her face. From old, he knew that her fire was counterbalanced by a real capacity for empathy.
How was it that he hadn’t seen that at the time, when he had walked out on her without a backward glance?
‘You need to think past yourself,’ he urged, leaning forward, forearms resting on his thighs, all his leashed power at bay but ferocious intent still stamped on his lean, beautiful face. ‘Think about what Sam will think if years down the road he believes that you deprived him of a lifestyle that could have been within his reach.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Abigail frowned in confusion at this new angle he’d decided to explore.
‘Don’t you think that if you wait until he’s a teenager, demanding to know who I am, that one look at the privileges that have passed him by might lead to a certain amount of resentment?’
‘I would never raise any child of mine to be materialistic,’ Abigail countered gamely, while her mind took hold of this whole new disturbing slant and began to chew it over.
‘That’s as may be,’ Leandro continued remorselessly, ‘but, human nature being what it is, unless you manage to raise a saint he will look at what could have been his and sooner or later blame you for denying him the opportunities that could have been at his disposal.’ He allowed a few seconds of silence so that she could mull over this scenario in her head.
He knew that he was battering her from all sides, and he quelled his guilt, because guilt was the last thing he should be feeling. The truth was that he meant to see this through to its inevitable conclusion and he was determined to get the result he wanted whether she liked it or not. She was just going to have to see past herself and absorb the bigger picture, so painting all the potential minefields that awaited her should she not come round to his point of view was necessary. Simple as that, because all was fair in love and war.
‘Unless,’ Leandro mused thoughtfully, ‘you plan on scaling the dizzy heights of financial success.’
‘I hate you.’ She glared at him and he raised his eyebrows in response.
‘You hate what I’m telling you, but you have to hear it, because we’re in a situation that requires a solution—and before we can reach that solution it’s important for you to stand back and look at everything from all possible angles.’
‘How can you be so...so...unemotional at a time like this?’
‘Aren’t you pleased that I am? What’s the alternative? That I sit here sobbing and wringing my hands in despair?’
His wry humour leapt out at her, almost but not quite making her want to smile. Why couldn’t he just be a complete bastard instead of reminding her that there was so much more to him? Right now, the last thing she wanted was to see the complex guy she had fallen in love with, the guy who could be as clever as the devil and as funny as any stand-up comedian. She didn’t want three-dimensional.
Agitated, she sprang to her feet and began pacing. She glanced at everything around her, at the opulence dripping from every surface.
‘My house may be tiny but this apartment is ridiculous when you think about putting a child in it!’ she burst out accusingly, moving to stand directly in front of him with her hands on her hips, then immediately wishing that she hadn’t because the powerful effect of his personality made her giddy.
‘I appreciate your honesty,’ he said gravely and she glared at him.
‘No, you don’t,’ she snapped. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever welcomed anyone being honest with you.’
‘Wrong. You were honest with me about some things when we were together. I distinctly remember you telling me that I lived in an ivory tower, and then taking it upon yourself to introduce me to the fun of fast-food dining. You called me a show-off who liked to flash my money around and laughed because I was outraged.’
A wave of colour flooded her cheeks and she stared at him, taken back in time for a few seconds, amazed that he remembered that incident—when he’d obviously never really been attached to her the way she’d been attached to him because it hadn’t taken him two minutes to find her replacement.
Flustered, she bought herself some time by continuing to glare at him. ‘Everything in here is white.’ She looked pointedly at the off-white sofa on which he was sprawled. ‘A toddler would wreak havoc with all your furniture, and that excuse of a handrail...’ she glanced behind her to the culprit before returning her triumphant gaze to his admittedly unfazed face ‘...well, that’s an accident waiting to happen.’
‘So you’ve decided that eliminating me from the picture isn’t going to do. Good. We’re on the same page with that.’
Abigail sat back down. She guessed that this was where the conversation would really begin, the starting point for making arrangements for visiting or whatever. She was staring at a future in which he would be part of her life for evermore, two people on parallel tracks joined together by the child they’d produced. Rattled, she gulped and stared at him.
‘I guess we can sort out visiting rights,’ she conceded faintly. ‘Would you want me to sign something? And, if you want to contribute financially, then that would be fine.’ She drew in a deep breath as she remembered that vague threat he had issued earlier. ‘But there’s no way I would ever let you try and take Sam away from me.’ Abigail found her courage and met his eyes without blinking.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Leandro assured her.
‘You said...’
‘I advised you to contemplate the option.’ He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Here’s the thing...’ he murmured in a soft, low voice that made her shiver and did weird but idiotically predictable things to her nervous system. ‘You’re right about my apartment.’ He sat back and gestured to the expanse of pristine white surrounding them without taking his eyes from her face. ‘Not user-friendly when it comes to children, and you can work on changing that.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Think of it as a blank canvas, and do whatever you want to bring it up to scratch.’
‘I’m not following you...’
‘And then, when you’ve got it exactly as you want it,’ he continued into the bewildered silence, ‘we can set about hunting for somewhere outside London—but not as distant as my Cotswolds place. In fact, I have had several people champing at the bit to get their hands on Greyling. I might just give one of them what they want and then we can search for somewhere more commutable. What are your thoughts on Berkshire?’
‘I’m not following you, Leandro!’
‘Of course you are,’ Leandro said silkily. ‘We have a child, and I’m not going to get embroiled in visiting rights and custody battles. I never thought about fatherhood but, now that it’s appeared from a great height, I intend to deal with it in the most logical manner possible. A child deserves both parents and the stability of a unified background.’
He sighed heavily and sifted his fingers through his hair. ‘My parents were married,’ he informed her quietly, ‘but that’s where the unity stopped—and you should know exactly what I’m talking about. We have a child between us, whether it was planned or not, and I intend to make sure that our child is brought up with both of us present, in a stable atmosphere. Nothing less is going to do.’
‘So you’re saying...’
‘Marriage, Abigail. Like it or not, there’s no other way.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘NO OTHER WAY?’ Abigail parroted, shock writ large all over her face. She had gone through a million and one scenarios of what could happen ever since she had told Leandro about Sam, but a marriage proposal hadn’t featured in any of those scenarios.
‘Correct. As I’ve made clear, I’m not going to subject our son to a back-and-forth situation between us.’
‘Leandro, we can’t get married.’ Her voice had gone up a couple of octaves and was bordering on hysterical. She swallowed and breathed deeply, in and out, slowly and evenly, counting to ten, because approaching this situation with ranting was going to settle her firmly on the back foot before their negotiations had even begun. ‘In an ideal world, a child is a cherished addition to the family unit and is blessed with two loving parents, but it’s not an ideal world. Telling me that that’s what we would be providing for Sam if we got married is just...just a fantasy.’
Leandro flushed darkly. He had offered to make the greatest sacrifice he knew for the sake of their child and he was incensed that she could throw his proposal back in his face without bothering to think things through. Buried beneath his anger was also a certain amount of pique. Countless women would have bitten his hand off for the proposal she was self-righteously tossing aside.
The Secret Sanchez Heir Page 8