Leandro growled a response. ‘I was going to take my time...’
‘Who said I wanted you to do that?’ She wriggled under him and opened her legs, which was his cue to nudge against her. She was so ready for him and he eased his finger into her until she was bucking against his hand. He had to hold himself to contain a driving urge to ejaculate. He couldn’t wait. She didn’t want him to wait.
He levered himself over her, propped up on both hands and drove into her. She had a body that had always seemed fashioned especially to fit him, sheathing him tightly and taking him to soaring heights of pleasure with the speed of a rocket launching off.
Abigail cried out. Her short, square nails dug into the small of his back and she raised her legs and wrapped them round him as he drove deep and hard into her.
She arched back as she came in an explosion of a thousand fireworks that splintered through her. Her cries were loud and guttural and barely recognisable. With Leandro, she’d learned to lose all her inhibitions. She crested, dimly aware that he, too, was surging towards an orgasm. Wave upon wave of indescribable pleasure rolled over her, an unstoppable tide of sensation that brought tears of real joy to her eyes.
Coming down filled her with such utter contentment that it was hard to remember the gravity of what they had been discussing and the repercussions of decisions that would have to be made. In a gesture born of habit, she sighed and hugged him.
She liked snuggling. Leandro recalled that, just as he recalled that he had enjoyed that too, even though it was something that should have gone against the grain, because he had always been accustomed to vacating the bed pretty much the instant he’d finished having sex with a woman.
Post-coital chit chat had never been his thing, far less cuddles.
On the verge of dozing off, Abigail’s eyes flew open and she pulled back and stared at him with horror.
‘We didn’t use contraception!’ She gasped. When he failed to respond with an equal show of horror, she repeated, just in case he’d developed temporary loss of hearing, ‘Did you hear what I just said, Leandro? We didn’t use any contraception and I’m not on the pill or anything!’
‘Marry me, Abigail.’ He pulled her back towards him, inserted his thigh between her legs and moved it slowly against her, rousing her all over again.
‘Leandro...’
‘Can you deny after what we’ve just done that there isn’t a powerful bond between us?’
‘Sex isn’t a powerful bond,’ Abigail denied with a frightening lack of conviction. ‘And is that why you wanted to make love to me? So that you could prove a point? That would be a really hateful thing to do.’
‘That’s not why I wanted to make love to you,’ Leandro said with complete sincerity. ‘I wanted to make love to you because I can’t resist you.’
‘Lust disappears,’ she was constrained to point out.
‘Most things do but who says that it disappears any faster than all that heady emotion people call love? You might be pregnant by me right now.’
‘That would be appalling,’ Abigail wailed, but he was still doing that thing with his thigh, and she was finding it hard to keep track of why she should be horrified.
She should be horrified, shouldn’t she? He didn’t love her and he never would, and lust did fade, and when it did it left nothing behind, nothing concrete that could ever shore up the walls of a relationship. Without love, those fortifications would crumble the minute the sex went off the boil.
But he was still moving his thigh between her legs and she could feel herself climbing again towards a climax. She gyrated against him and orgasmed, shuddering, moaning and clutching his broad shoulders, not caring that he was looking at her flushed face and open mouth, hearing the sounds of her physical satisfaction. In fact, she rather enjoyed the sensation of being observed. It was wanton and really, really sexy.
A thought flew through her head, like quicksilver. If he didn’t mind the thought of getting her pregnant, what did that say?
It told her one thing and it was that he wanted their relationship to work. He didn’t want to marry her with divorce as an option to be kept within sight. If that had been the case, he would never, ever have risked her getting pregnant with a second child.
Could what they had really work? she wondered. In a rush, she saw all the upsides to a situation she had previously discarded as being ridiculous.
Sam would have both parents there for him and that could only be a good thing. When it came to parenthood, you had to put all your selfish traits to one side and do what was best for your child, and she was unwillingly aware that being in a couple with Leandro would be best for their son.
Then there was the little matter of the separate lives he had talked about. If they were together, she wouldn’t have to worry about him heading straight into the arms of some woman who wanted to prove that she could be suitable stepmother material. She wouldn’t have to face a future riven with jealousy she was forced to conceal.
Because she would be jealous. She couldn’t bear the thought of him sleeping with anyone else.
Because she was still in love with him.
The realisation didn’t jump out at her like a jack-in-the-box, a shocking revelation. It crept out as something she had known all along, deep down. Lust didn’t last, but if they both worked truly hard at making things work between them then who was to say that he wouldn’t, one day, come to love her the way she loved him? He knew everything there was to know about her now. He knew who she was and where she had come from.
The future suddenly glimmered in front of her, full of possibilities.
‘You’re not saying anything.’ Leandro had a surprising urge for Abigail to put him out of his misery. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’
‘I bet that’s something you’ve never asked any woman to do before,’ she teased, and he relaxed. It was crazy but he felt quite heady with relief because she wasn’t fighting him. He intended to capitalise on that if it killed him.
‘Well...?’ he pressed impatiently, and Abigail sighed, smiled and looked at the familiar lines of his beautiful face.
‘You’re right,’ she said softly. ‘Sam deserves the chance of both parents being there for him. But...’ She hesitated and then ploughed on. ‘I won’t marry you. Let’s live together, Leandro. Let’s see if we can work together as parents...’
It wasn’t what he wanted but he figured that it was a great deal better than nothing. ‘If that’s how you want to play it,’ he conceded gracefully, already making plans to improve on that concession with the greatest possible speed, ‘then very well. We’ll see if it works between us. For our son’s sake.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
ABIGAIL STOOD LOOKING at the little cottage. It was in a beautiful location, forty-five minutes out of London and accessed via picturesque little lanes.
She still had to pinch herself that Leandro was the same man who had pronounced only several weeks ago that the only thing he wanted from her was sex, because as far as he was concerned she was no more than unfinished business waiting for a line to be drawn under it.
When she had decided to tell him about Sam, she hadn’t known what to expect. He didn’t love her. In fact, he felt the opposite. Nor had marriage ever been on his agenda before. Not even Rosalind, with her impeccable connections and shared social circle, had been able to persuade him otherwise.
Yet, after the initial shock, he had rallied his forces and handled the explosion thrown at him with admirable aplomb. His proposal of marriage had been from a keen sense of duty, which was something she figured out, because the minute he had been given an out he had been happy to accept the far less committed alternative.
Since they had reached the decision to live together nearly two months ago, Leandro had been a model of attentiveness. Anything, it would seem, to further his des
ire to be a good father. Abigail wasn’t entirely surprised, because Leandro always had been a man who threw himself one hundred per cent into everything he did, which was one of the reasons why he had become so successful at such a young age.
Faced with the shock of ready-made fatherhood, he had not run from commitment, but instead had dealt with the situation head on.
It would have been so tempting to think that he had feelings for her and not just for Sam, but she wasn’t stupid. He would have married her because, traditionalist to the core, he had seen nothing wrong in making the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his son. Over the past few weeks, she had come more and more to understand why. Occasionally, when his guard was down, he would let fall little snippets of information about his own childhood and she now had a little more idea of the boy who had become the man.
However, happily released from the duty of putting a wedding ring on her finger, Leandro was doing the next best thing, which was proving to her that he could be the best father possible.
The only fly in the ointment was the fact that she thought that she knew why—once he had proved himself sufficiently, he would walk away from her, safe in the knowledge that she would never try to break the bond he had been at pains to create with Sam. She still felt sick when she thought about him walking away straight into the arms of another woman, but the marriage offer was no longer on the table, and she had had good reasons for turning it down.
Yet everything was so perfect. She just wanted to believe the impossible and she was constantly having to wage war against being lulled into thinking that all the grand gestures meant more than they actually did. But surely, she caught herself thinking more and more as time went on, things were changing between them? To all intents and purposes, they were a couple, and if Leandro didn’t have the same feelings for her as she had for him then who was to say that that wouldn’t change given time? Hope, she knew, could be as much an enemy as a friend, and she really tried to avoid it like the plague, but it still crept in, filling her head with fantasies and presenting a future that was rosy and bright.
This idyllic cottage was definitely high on the ‘rosy and bright’ spectrum.
‘When you said you had a surprise for me, I hadn’t expected anything like this,’ she murmured, walking towards the chocolate-box white picket fence and then just standing there, lost in pleasant day dreams about how perfect life could be here. She wished they had brought Sam, but at five in the evening it was perilously close to his dinner and bath time, and the nanny Leandro had engaged several weeks previously had persuaded her to leave him back at the apartment. Abigail had been easily swayed, for she knew just how demanding her son could get when he began getting tired and hungry.
‘Like it?’ Leandro moved smoothly to stand next to her. He couldn’t have arranged this on a more pleasant afternoon. Spring was in the air and, although the sun was low, the charm of the place with its climbing roses and neat path to the front door was inescapable.
He had taken great pains to lay it on thick with the estate agent, and it was just the sort of place he was looking for. He could have summed it up thus: the sort of place I would never normally have glanced at in a million years.
But, despite her background and the toughness that had seen Abigail through hard times, including the pregnancy she had borne on her own, she was a romantic at heart and that was something he had recognised when they had been seeing each other the first time round. She didn’t like his white, modern, minimalist apartment because what she did really like was exactly what she was gaping at right now, round-eyed and thrilled to death.
‘I absolutely love it.’ She turned to him and smiled and, looking down at her, Leandro wanted to do what he always seemed to want to do whenever he was anywhere near her—whisk her away like a cave man and have his wicked way with her. She could still get his libido going in five seconds flat and that showed no signs of abating, which was something of a minor miracle, given his predilection towards a fast turnover when it came to the opposite sex.
‘But...’ she frowned and looked at him seriously ‘...we agreed that every decision we took would be one we both wanted, Leandro. Is this sort of place really your kind of thing? It’s nothing like your apartment.’
‘Should we look inside before we start having this conversation? The place is vacant and the estate agent said we could take our time and then drop the keys back with them through the letter box.’
Abigail looked at the mesmerising beauty of his tanned face and couldn’t help falling a little faster into the seductive hope that all of this thoughtfulness might add up to more than just the considerate behaviour of a decent guy who wanted to build a solid friendship with her before he disappeared out of her life.
‘Okay.’ She grinned happily as he unhooked the gate and ushered her up to the front door. ‘I just never thought that this was your kind of thing...’
‘Things are slightly different when there’s a child to consider,’ Leandro pointed out and Abigail stifled a sigh because, of course, all of this was being done for Sam.
After his first uncertain steps in the bonding department, Leandro had become increasingly confident with his son. From picking him up and holding him, arms outstretched, with the puzzled expression of someone not too sure about the wriggling bundle in his arms, Leandro was now confident enough to bathe his son, and didn’t seem to mind grubby fingers on his expensive clothes. He showed limitless patience now that Sam was starting to walk and, if there was one fault, it was that he had a tendency to overindulge his son with presents that were far too grown-up for a one-year-old.
‘Greyling would have been far too big,’ Leandro pointed out with irrefutable logic, ‘and my apartment is, as you’ve said, far too...white. This seemed a good compromise.’ He pushed open the door and in they stepped.
Leandro had visited the place with the estate agent only a couple of days previously. He knew what to expect. Now, he watched as Abigail turned a slow circle in the small hall with its attractive flagstone tiled floor.
‘Wow.’
On closer inspection, Leandro could spot a couple of cracked tiles by the wall, but he went along with her enthusiasm as they explored the cottage which was deceptively big and quirkily laid out.
She gushed over everything, from the coving and dado rails, to the range in the kitchen and all the open fireplaces in the rooms. She waxed lyrical about the utility room and the larder. Abigail confessed that never in a million years had she ever thought that she might end up living in a fairy-tale cottage such as this.
They ended up in the garden, which was a riot of flowerbeds and fruit trees.
‘Commuting is going to be difficult for you,’ Leandro remarked as they sat side by side on a wooden bench placed strategically under one of the apple trees. It was cool but clear and the silence of the countryside felt like an antidote to the chaos and noise of London life.
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Abigail responded in some dismay. She had continued with her job, albeit working shorter hours, because she hadn’t wanted to lose the small amount of financial independence it afforded her. Deep down she wanted to leave, to spend far more of her time with Sam, but she couldn’t bring herself to be so completely dependent on Leandro.
What about when this happy charade ended and Leandro returned to his normal life? Of course, he would ensure that there was a hefty financial settlement involved, but how would she feel about accepting his money and becoming, effectively, a kept woman?
The downside of rejecting his marriage proposal was like the steady drip of acid wearing away all her good intentions, yet what was the point of marriage if it was undertaken for the wrong reasons? The more she was with Leandro, the more she wanted love from him and not duty.
‘It wouldn’t make sense for you to leave here at a ridiculous hour in the morning to get into London and do a job that you are not req
uired to do in the first place.’
‘You don’t understand...’
‘You’re right. I don’t understand. You should be overjoyed that there is no financial imperative for you to go out to work.’
Abigail tensed. ‘I can’t be dependent on you, Leandro. You’re being generous because of Sam but, face it, if I hadn’t accidentally fallen pregnant then we wouldn’t be here now.’ She hated the way she hoped that he would refute that, although she couldn’t imagine what he could say to do so.
‘There’s no point dealing in “what if?”s,’ Leandro said with deflating logic. ‘The fact is that we’re at this point now and you have a choice to make. Either you relinquish the job in London and move in here, or we stay at the apartment and you continue working. What’s it to be? If you decide that this is the sort of place that would suit you, then say the word and I can have this deal wrapped up by the end of the month.’ Leandro turned to her and watched her averted profile like a hawk.
The longer he was with her, the more convinced he was that ‘gold-digger’ she certainly was not. But he hadn’t understood her determination to carry on working, even though the hours had been shortened. Whilst she accepted a modest allowance from him for Sam—far, far less than he would be happy giving her—she still persisted in using her own money to buy anything for herself. He had only just managed to persuade her to stop buying food supplies with what she earned. On the few occasions when he had presented her with items of jewellery, little gifts she could wear out when he took her somewhere flash for dinner, she had accepted, but politely, wearing them once for his benefit then stashing them away in her bedroom drawer.
She got that close but was determined to get no closer and he couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t forgive him for having walked away from her the first time. She never harked back to it, but why else would she have turned down his marriage proposal? There was still a part of her that distrusted him. Leandro was certain of it.
The Secret Sanchez Heir Page 10