The Secret Sanchez Heir

by Cathy Williams

  For the first time, she shopped for herself and really enjoyed it.

  On her way to the four-wheel drive in which she and Sam but not Leandro would be travelling to the cottage, she paused to look at herself in the mirror.

  She’d found her own style. She wasn’t interested in flashy designer labels and, left to her own devices, with Leandro’s explicit instructions ringing in her ears, she had gravitated towards the clothes she had more or less always worn but this time well cut, well tailored and just that bit smarter. Today, she was in a pair of perfectly fitting designer jeans with designer rips at the knees and a polo shirt with a very small, very discreet logo over the breast pocket. Blue jeans and a white top, accompanied by a pair of flat, tan-and-white leather pumps. She looked stylish.

  From behind, she registered Leandro strolling towards her, Sam in his arms.

  She knew that, to any outsider, they looked as if they could have stepped straight out of the pages of a magazine. She turned and smiled. ‘I’m surprised he’s not demanding to get down.’ Abigail reached out for her son who lunged for her and then, predictably, squirmed until they settled him on the ground. These days he crawled and cruised everywhere with the sort of reckless enthusiasm that kept them both on their toes, sweeping aside breakables and covering sharp corners.

  It never failed to amaze her just how naturally those simple things came to Leandro. He had embraced fatherhood. No one could accuse him of not putting his all into it. And by night he embraced the physical closeness that always left her wanting more of him. He was the very essence of what any woman would consider herself lucky to have ended up with. He was as amusing, intelligent and wildly, crazily sexy as he always had been, but scratch the surface and she knew that she wouldn’t find the love she desperately wanted.

  Never, not once, not even in the heat of passion, had he uttered any unguarded words that could have led her to think that he had the sort of feelings for her that she had for him.

  ‘Want’ was a staple in his vocabulary but ‘love and need’ were ostensibly missing and, with each passing day, she wondered what would happen to them when their three months were up.

  He never discussed it and neither did she. She was plagued by the suspicion that she was on trial, and cautious about how she responded, because she knew that what he wanted was a functioning business arrangement and not the sort of complicated emotional involvement that love brought with it.

  Deep down she knew that if, at the end of the three-month period, he repeated that offer of marriage then she would accept. They got along, they were bonded in their love for Sam and the sex was mind-blowing. Many marriages worked quite happily on less.

  Was she selling herself short? She didn’t think so because, whilst she had never envisaged being married to a guy who wasn’t madly in love with her, she also couldn’t imagine anyone else completing her the way he did.

  She wondered whether he would get bored of her and feel tempted to stray but uneasily that was a bridge she was prepared to cross when she came to it.

  ‘Penny for them.’ Leandro scooped up his son, leant to brush a kiss on the side of her neck and then held Sam up high until he squealed with laughter, before handing him over to Abigail.

  ‘Just thinking about the move,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Sorry I won’t be able to come with you now,’ Leandro told her. ‘but I’ll be there later.’ He grinned. ‘You’ll probably get a lot more done without me around,’ he told her. ‘I would probably get under your feet. Or perhaps just under you.’

  Abigail blushed bright red, reminded of just how much he thought about sex, practically to the exclusion of everything else aside from Sam and his work.

  Determined not to dwell on what was missing in her life, but to focus on what she had, Abigail spent the drive to the cottage making lots of mental lists of what she would do and how she would apportion her time.

  She had been out several times to see it, had supervised the arrangement of the various bits of furniture which had arrived over a period of three days, yet an hour later, when the four-wheel drive drew up in front of the cottage, she was charmed all over again.

  The cottage had been upgraded to a very high standard, having been repainted, with new units put into the kitchen and landscaping done in the back garden, as well as hand-made, built-in furniture having been installed in the bedrooms. She and Sam explored the place. She had given the nanny a few days off so that she could accustom herself to the cottage, just Sam, Leandro and her, and as Leandro’s driver disappeared back to London Abigail felt the stirring of excitement at this new step in her life.

  She allowed Sam to run around the sitting room, where there were no hard edges or glass, then she played with him in the garden and, by the time his afternoon nap time came at one-thirty, he was exhausted.

  The kettle was boiling for a cup of tea when the doorbell went and her heart leapt at the prospect of Leandro being here much earlier than anticipated.

  She dashed to the door, pulled it open and then fell back in surprise to see Cecilia standing on her doorstep, as stunningly gorgeous as she had been the last time they had seen one another. Both Leandro and his sister shared the same colouring, both olive-skinned with black hair and perfectly chiselled features. Where Leandro’s beauty was hard-edged and aggressively masculine, his sister’s was aristocratic and intensely feminine. She was the puma to Leandro’s tiger. Abigail associated pumas with cunning and danger, which was why she remained blocking the doorway.

  ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ Cecilia peered past her and took a step forward. ‘Great place. I nabbed a peek at the particulars in Leandro’s apartment when I arrived a couple of hours ago but it’s even better in the flesh. I can see that you’ve really landed on your feet, Abigail. Must be nice for you, all things considered.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Leandro hadn’t mentioned, not even in passing, that his sister was due back in the country today. Had that been a deliberate oversight on his part? Or had Cecilia descended on him without warning?

  ‘To catch up. Why else? I have driven all the way from London. The least you could do is invite me in for a glass of something.’

  ‘I thought you were in Fiji.’

  ‘Two weeks off. Thought I’d come and see my darling brother. In fact, I just left him with a few things to think about.’

  Abigail stilled and she stood aside and quietly invited Cecilia in, guiding her immediately to the kitchen, while the other woman made a big show of looking around her and exclaiming with delight at everything she saw, from the pictures on the walls to the bottle-green range in the kitchen.

  ‘Hats off to you. You’ve done well. Bet you never thought you’d end up in a fancy cottage with a wad of cash to spend on yourself! Clever of you to get pregnant,’ she mused, glancing at her exquisitely manicured nails and buffing them with her thumb before fixing huge, almond-shaped eyes on her.

  Abigail didn’t say anything, instead turning away and taking her time to make a pot of tea. Her heart was hammering and she knew, with a sickening feeling, that this conversation was going somewhere and the destination wasn’t going to be very nice.

  But, now that the other woman was in the cottage, she had little option but to travel down the circuitous route of icy small talk laced with sugar-coated insults. She bit her tongue. There was no way that she was going to open up a can of worms by getting into an argument with Leandro’s sister.

  ‘He tells me that marriage is on the table,’ Cecilia said abruptly. They were sitting at opposite ends of the cleverly weathered wooden table, which had had pride of place in the kitchen at Greyling, and Abigail nodded and met the other woman’s eyes squarely.

  ‘We feel that Sam would benefit from having both of us around.’

  ‘Stop talking about yourself and my brother as though you’re a couple,’ Cecilia hissed. ‘You
’re not a couple. You weren’t then and you aren’t now.’ Her eyes welled up. ‘I knew you were trouble the minute you met Leandro the first time round. He barely had time to talk to me when you appeared on the scene!’

  Concerned, Abigail flew to her feet and rummaged in her handbag which she had slung on the kitchen counter, extracting a wad of tissues and shoving them over to Cecilia.

  ‘I should have known that something was up when he sent me halfway across the world to oversee that hotel in Fiji.’ Her voice wobbled but the glare was intact. ‘It was impossible to talk to him, what with the time difference and the problems with the Internet! But I found out everything today when I confronted him. You are not going to marry my brother. You are not going to take him away from me.’

  ‘I—I’m not planning on taking him away from you,’ Abigail stammered.

  ‘He doesn’t want to marry you!’ Cecilia’s voice had risen and Abigail worriedly glanced at the kitchen door, which was open. The last thing she needed was a shouting Cecilia and a screaming toddler. ‘You’re all wrong for Leandro and the last thing he wants is to marry you.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘Of course he did!’ Cecilia shouted. ‘We discuss everything! He told me that you’re forcing him to marry you because of the kid. He told me that you’re not really his type. He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t love you!’

  Abigail looked down. Cecilia had a vested interest in saying all those things, in causing as much chaos as she could. But was she lying? She was only confirming what Abigail already knew.

  She expected another shrieking tirade from the other woman, and was rising to her feet to forestall that by leading her firmly out of the cottage, when Leandro’s voice from the doorway of the kitchen stopped her in her tracks.

  She hadn’t heard him enter the house. Of course, why would she? He had a key and she had been entirely focused on Cecilia. She wouldn’t have noticed two yetis if they had walked past the kitchen door holding hands.

  ‘Cecilia.’ Leandro’s deep voice was cool, as was the gaze arrowing towards his sister as she spun round, reddening before rushing to his side. But before she could hug him he held out his arms to stop her. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I—I came to say hi to my nephew,’ she stammered, ‘but she wouldn’t let me.’

  Abigail opened her mouth to protest and then was overcome by a feeling of deep hopelessness. Why would Leandro believe her? He didn’t love her. It was going to be just as it had been nearly two years ago when he had listened to Cecilia and refused to give Abigail a fair hearing. He had been judge, jury and executioner to their relationship and why would it be any different now?

  Perhaps he had already been persuaded that without love he was better off without her, whatever he said about wanting to stay with her because of Sam. Perhaps he might have drifted into a relationship with her, but he was no doubt open to being persuaded by Cecilia. Abigail could easily envisage a situation where she managed to convince him that there was someone better for him out there, someone who shared the same background, someone he could love rather than like, and with whom the ties would not be centred around obligation and duties to an infant he had never asked for.

  Her imagination was running riot but through all that she couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t chastising his sister. Indeed, he was drawing her to one side, although his eyes were firmly focused on Abigail.

  ‘I’ll make sure Cecilia gets back to London,’ he said without any inflection in his voice at all that could have given her a clue as to what he was thinking.

  Which made her fear that he was already thinking the worst of her. He had descended out of the blue to be told that she was the cruel woman withholding a nephew from his aunt. Cecilia could work a sob story like an Oscar-winning actress.

  And yet, in receipt of a sly look from the other woman as she was gently led out of the kitchen, Abigail couldn’t help a pang of sympathy for her. That plaintive voice had been real. Cecilia was hurt because she had felt ignored by the big brother who had always had time for her. The hint of tears had not been phoney.

  Not that any of that changed anything. The three months might barely have started, but if Leandro could not give her the benefit of the doubt now, and remain behind to hear from her exactly what had transpired between herself and his sister, then he would never be prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt over anything.

  In short, nothing had fundamentally changed between them since he had turned his back on her all that time ago, except that he was now a father. His attitude towards her remained the same.

  He would hand-deliver Cecilia back to London, all those protective instincts that had been fostered since youth would kick into gear and he would indulge his sister and whatever lies she chose to tell him.

  Lord knew, he would probably head straight back up to the cottage to fling another one of his terms and conditions in her face, specifically one banning her from upsetting his sister.

  Suddenly weary beyond belief, Abigail went out into the garden and headed straight for the lovely gazebo that had been erected under one of the fruit trees. Sam’s window was flung open and she knew that she would be able to hear him should he wake up and start crying, although his afternoon naps were long, and she knew that he wouldn’t be up for at least another hour.

  Precious time during which she would try and get her thoughts in order, try and reach a conclusion to the ebb and flow of life as she had recently been living it.

  Her thoughts became muddled as she closed her eyes. It was a fine day, the breeze just the right side of warm. Nature had its own sounds and with her eyes closed she could really appreciate all of them. The sound of the leaves in the trees rustling, the birds chirping and, in the distance, the roll of traffic because although the cottage was in the middle of nowhere this was something of an illusion, because the road to London was not terribly far away.

  Drifting into a light doze, she had a dream of Leandro walking away from her and, with every panicked step she took closer to him, the faster he moved away, glancing back towards her and walking on even though he could see that she was upset.

  She started violently when his deep, familiar voice said, way too close and way too vibrant to belong to a dream, ‘Falling asleep in the sun is never a good idea.’

  Abigail’s eyes flew open and she gaped. ‘I thought you were dropping your sister back down to London!’

  ‘She came in a car,’ Leandro said drily, ‘and there’s no reason why she can’t return in it—although my driver brought me here, so I’ve had him deliver her back down and leave my car here.’ He stood where he was, hands in his pockets, his dark, beautiful face revealing precious little.

  He looked away briefly, and when he raked his fingers through his hair she finally identified that unrevealing expression on his face for what it was. Discomfort. Since she had never seen him out of his depth, that was a piercing cause for concern, and suddenly all the doubts and insecurities she had nurtured under the surface rose to the top, clamouring to be heard.

  Heart in her mouth, she cleared her throat and said quietly, ‘I think we should have a chat. I’m not sure what your sister told you, Leandro, but she did tell me what you said to her about... Well, put it this way, about your heart not being in making this relationship work, and it’s no big deal.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘It’s nothing that I didn’t know, and I want you to know that I really appreciate the effort you’ve made in trying to stay together for Sam’s sake. It was never going to happen, of course,’ she said ruefully, lowering her eyes. ‘You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, which is what we have been trying to do. I’m sure you’ll agree with me.’

  She looked at him and flushed because he was staring at her with such a curious look of hesitancy that she didn’t know whether to carry on i
n the same vein, shift course or bolt for the back door.

  She did none of those things. Instead, she plastered a smile on her face and prompted, ‘Well? Say something, Leandro. Because Sam is going to be up soon and if we have to have this talk then this is the best time to have it...’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘I HAD NO idea that Cecilia was going to show up at my apartment today. At least, not without warning.’

  ‘But you spoke to her on the phone.’ Abigail restively stood up and began heading into the cottage, because outside was for relaxing and she wasn’t feeling relaxed. She was aware of Leandro following her. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. ‘She must have told you,’ she carried on, swinging round to look at him, hand on one hip. ‘I mean, she made it clear that you tell each other everything.’ This last was slung at him in an accusatory voice and Leandro glanced away, jaw tensing.

  When had all his control started seeping away? Control was the one thing he had always aimed for. Control in his professional life and control in his private life. When had that all disappeared? Could he have stopped it somewhere along the way or was it just a process that had begun when Abigail had first entered his life, a process that had simply been temporarily halted when she had left, only to continue the moment she’d returned?

  He certainly didn’t feel in control now. He felt...like any red-blooded man would feel if he had one foot dangling off the edge of a precipice.

  She sat down at the table but was staring off into the distance.

  ‘She has always been dependent on me,’ Leandro explained heavily. ‘Our parents had little time for us and Cecilia relied heavily on me for pretty much everything. Of course, as time went on, I assumed she was becoming more independent, and certainly on the surface she had a good life. She never wanted for anything and she had a lot of friends. She still came to me for advice. She still confided in me. I found it amusing, and I suppose it was a comfort zone that worked. She did her degree, immediately started working for my organisation in the hospitality field and she was, and is, excellent at it.’