by Lynne Graham
Well, he had given her a great deal of sexual satisfaction and then he had still gone on to get into bed with other women. Oh, yes, she was convinced that there had been more than that encounter with Dido, for the opportunities to flirt and seduce for a man of Leo’s looks and wealth probably came up everywhere he went, particularly when he was travelling. This was a guy she literally could not trust out of her sight, she reminded herself sternly.
‘So, how was your trip?’ Letty asked Leo with an interest that even he could see was false, for she was not a good dissembler and her expressive face was a dead giveaway.
‘Like every other trip.’
What the hell had he done? Leo was asking himself in frustration, striving to think of something he might have said on the phone that could have brought about such a change in her. She had left Ios acting warm and confiding and caring and all of a sudden that was gone. He watched in disbelief as Letty sped upstairs, clearly keen to leave him behind, and that was the final straw that broke his control and sent him stalking up the stairs in her wake.
Letty was locked in the bathroom, frantically washing and rewashing her hands, unaware that she was doing it while she struggled to work out how she was supposed to deal with Leo, now that he was back in the house.
She had decorated the whole house for Christmas. There were trees everywhere but the bedrooms. They now had George the dog, a rescue animal with more bad habits than a criminal. George chewed everything from shoes to rugs. He stole food. He tried to get into bed with the children. Much like Leo, George had no boundaries but, unlike Leo, he was very loving. Leo would totally freak out if he knew she was comparing him, even in passing, with a homeless animal, she conceded, finally drying her hands and pulling herself together, although the tendency to cry over the pain she was suppressing still hovered over her like a threatening black cloud. It had been easier to pretend to be happy when Leo was absent. Now that he was back it was a huge challenge for her.
‘Letty!’ A sharp knock sounded on the door and she froze like a burglar caught in the act of theft before swallowing hard and opening the door.
‘Sorry... I’m sure you want a shower,’ she said in a brittle tone.
‘No, surprisingly enough,’ Leo murmured with only the merest hint of sarcasm, ‘I wanted to see my wife.’
Halfway to the bedroom door to leave, Letty stilled. ‘Oh?’ she said, spinning reluctantly back.
‘Luckily for me, you are a lousy actress,’ Leo continued tautly, subjecting her to a feverishly intense scrutiny. ‘I’m not blind, Letty. What’s wrong? Obviously there’s something wrong because you’ve changed.’
Letty lost colour and stiffened, wondering how on earth he had so quickly registered that change on her part while she had flattered herself with the belief that she was treating him as she always had.
‘We’ve always been honest with each other,’ Leo bit out harshly in the dragging silence that had fallen between them.
‘I saw a newspaper photo of you having lunch with Dido,’ Letty framed flatly, accusingly, failing utterly to hold back that tone of condemnation. ‘I didn’t require anything else to know that you’d returned to your former way of life.’
‘Theé mou, Letty,’ Leo growled. ‘I’m not guilty of that cardinal error. I lunched with Dido, no argument on that score. For a long time I’ve been a theatre angel. I back stage productions that are likely to be successful. That’s how I first met Dido years ago. She was a very good investment.’
‘Investment?’ Letty echoed with raised brows and a frown. ‘I think your ties were rather more intimate than that.’
‘Were being the correct word. Eight years ago, Letty, and there has been no sexual intimacy between us since that ended after an affair that lasted a couple of months,’ Leo clarified. ‘Dido, who is fiercely ambitious, chases me purely for my wealth in the hope of persuading me to invest in her next stage production. But, to be frank, I only had lunch with her in the first place to tell her to back off with the texts and the allegedly accidental meetings and the pretence that we were once a couple. We were never a couple. We were never close...and that’s the truth.’
Letty clamped her hands together because they were trembling, and she didn’t want him to notice that humiliating fact. ‘I’m not sure I can believe—’
‘I’m afraid you have to because I will not accept that one stupid photo can come between you and me!’ Leo countered in a raw undertone.
‘No...’ Letty made an almost clumsy movement with one hand to express her continuing tension. ‘What came between us was your insistence on retaining your freedom as a married man, which meant that naturally when I saw you in company with Dido, I assumed—’
Leo cast off his coat and dug a hand into the inner pocket of his suit jacket to withdraw a folded document. ‘Our prenuptial agreement with that clause removed. You have to sign it too with a witness before it’s legal but please note the date when I signed...’
Her throat tight, her brow indented with uncertainty as she accepted the document and rifled through it to check that the that offensive clause had genuinely been removed and not simply rephrased and slipped in someplace else. He had signed it within a day of her leaving the island, which was a surprise.
As Letty sat down at the foot of the bed to read it all properly, Leo’s mouth quirked with appreciation. ‘You’re never going to take me on trust, are you?’
‘Probably not,’ she agreed, setting the prenuptial contract down beside her on the bed and adding, ‘So... I have to ask...what led to this sudden change of heart. I mean, I know that only a few days before you signed that you were still vehemently insisting that you had to keep that freedom.’
Put on the spot that directly, Leo grimaced. ‘Finding out what my father went through, married to my mother, had an enormous effect on me. It knocked me for six,’ he confessed with faint embarrassment. ‘I have ignored him pretty much all my life because I held onto unfair assumptions about his character but, when I really thought about it, my resentment came down to his inability to control Katrina and the way she treated my sister and me as children. I blamed him for that because he married her. Now I appreciate that he had no idea what was going on in his own home because she never treated us badly when he was around.’
Letty nodded. ‘You had a real heart to heart with him, didn’t you?’ she pressed.
‘And I have you to thank for that because without your intervention I would have gone on with the same mind-set.’ He sighed with regret. ‘Now I have the father I always wanted but didn’t appreciate. Katrina being gone from our lives makes that possible.’
‘Does he know...? I mean, about Katrina coming on to you as well?’ Letty enquired with a grimace of distaste.
‘Yes. There had to be total honesty from both of us. He was devastated when I told him, but I think it also helped him to accept that Katrina never loved him the way he believed she did and, in a sense, it drew a line under all the rest of it,’ he completed grimly. ‘I notice that his state of mind is much improved since I last saw him.’
‘Yes, Mum and he are great buddies,’ Letty remarked. ‘I understand everything that you’re sharing with me but I still don’t understand why you finally decided to remove that clause from the agreement. Just to please me? To lull me into a false sense of security? Why?’
‘Do you believe me about Dido? She was after my financial backing, not me personally,’ Leo stated in frustration. ‘She’s very persistent, and I realised that it would take a personal meeting and a blunt refusal to get her to back off. She’s so vain that she couldn’t see that flattery and flirtation weren’t going to get her anywhere with me, particularly after she had offended my wife. That’s what that lunch was about.’
Letty nodded, wryly amused at that ‘offended my wife’, thrown in as if it was a fact of life that Leo should object to such a sin. ‘Yes, I believe that the lunch was innocen
t,’ she conceded, feeling a great rolling wave of wounded pain evaporating from her stiff body as she sat there. ‘So, according to you, you’re going to be faithful now...or are you still in the trying to be faithful phase?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘No, I’m all yours, entirely yours,’ Leo stressed, a faint smile lightening the lingering strain etched around his wide sensual mouth. ‘For good.’
Letty frowned. ‘For good?’ she queried in astonishment.
‘You’re not grasping what I’m trying to tell you here, yineka mou,’ Leo lamented. ‘A gorgeous blonde in biker leathers came into my office and blew my whole life apart in the space of a day. Within a week I was more fascinated by her than any woman I have ever met. Within two weeks I was so hot for her I was performing mental acrobatics to persuade her into being mine, really mine...but I hadn’t quite come to terms with what I was signing up for. That was my mistake. I came at you like a bull in a china shop before I had thought it all through.’
‘Are you talking about me?’ Letty whispered uncertainly.
‘Letty, who the hell else would I be talking about?’ he groaned, crouching down in front of her. ‘When I said I’m yours for good, I was telling you that I fell head over heels in love with you like a stupid teenager.’
Her lashes fluttered up on wide green eyes as she studied him fixedly. ‘Like a very bright but emotionally stunted teenager,’ she parried.
‘I knew you would put another spin on it...so to try romance with an unromantic and very practical woman and me being a man who has never tried that before either,’ Leo admitted ruefully, ‘I bought this...’
In a state of disbelief at Leo telling her that he had fallen in love with her, Letty watched as he threaded a diamond eternity ring on her finger next to her wedding band. ‘Is that the one I didn’t get for my birthday?’ she asked uneasily.
‘No, it’s an entirely new and much more expensive one and this time it truly expresses what I feel—that I’ve got to have you for ever,’ Leo confessed.
‘Oh...’ Letty was speechless, plunged in the misery of believing she was being forced to welcome home an unfaithful husband and then sent shooting back up to heights she had never dared to even dream of, before being told that she was loved. Leo loved her. It felt as if she was living a dream, a dizzy impossible girlish dream, and she burst into floods of tears, her self-control destroyed.
‘Theós mou...what did I say?’ Leo exclaimed, vaulting back upright again and hauling her up into the circle of his arms.
‘I’m just so h-happy!’ Letty sobbed into his shoulder. ‘I was worried you were a sex addict rather than a player and I didn’t think you’d consider therapy—’
‘Listen to me for once. I was never a player. I never did one-night stands. I picked one woman and would be with her for a couple of months...a mistress, rather than a lover, though,’ Leo hastened to explain.
‘But why...mistresses?’ Letty demanded, struggling to get the stupid, far too emotional, tears back under control because she knew he had to think she was crazy to react like that to a declaration of love.
‘Think about it, Letty. I never knew love. When I was still pretty young my grandfather informed me that I would be expected to marry but that the men in my family always had mistresses. It was what he called “a tidy solution”. He had one. I assumed my father had one, although he assures me he didn’t. It seemed normal not to want to get involved, other than sexually, with a woman. My mother’s love is the vaguest, most distant memory. My stepmother had no time for me and I soon understood that she didn’t love my father either,’ he explained. ‘Although Panos tried to be affectionate I backed away from it because Katrina was worse if Ana or I took my father’s attention away from her. I didn’t know what love was. I didn’t know what it felt like...’
‘And what does it feel like?’ she asked her volatile husband.
‘Like living in a storm where everything’s magnified and little things assume too much importance,’ he groaned. ‘When we were on the island it wasn’t that I resented the time you spent with the kids, it was that I wanted more of you myself and it wasn’t working out that way. Only when you were gone did I appreciate how confused I was, how everything seemed different with you and I didn’t understand why until I had the space to think it through.’
‘And decided that it was love? Are you sure?’ Letty, ever the doubter, questioned.
Leo laughed with unholy amusement as he gazed down into her anxious face. ‘Nobody was more shocked than I was to appreciate that I loved you, but then you’re a pretty special woman so it’s not really that surprising. You didn’t want me for my money, except to help your family. You didn’t want me for my body.’
‘And where did you get that idea?’ Letty asked as she began unbuttoning his shirt with alacrity.
‘Yes, but it’s not only for sex, is it?’ Leo studied her. ‘Although, if it is, I’m not strong enough to say no, you can’t have me until you return my feelings...but do you think you could...eventually?’
Not impervious to the vulnerability in his stunning gaze, Letty pretended to ponder and then said, ‘Truth is... I started falling in love with you that first day in your office too. There was just something about you and, apart from the commitment phobia, I liked everything else about you a lot.’
‘You...did? You didn’t show it.’
‘Obviously I tried to hide the fact that I found you attractive when you told me you were suggesting a platonic marriage,’ Letty pointed out. ‘But somehow that inappropriate attraction just kept on getting stronger, which is why I probably succumbed on our wedding night.’
‘And then I wrecked it all again within hours.’ Leo sighed. ‘I’m sorry, sincerely sorry that I kept on flip-flopping all over the place like a stranded fish on the shore. I didn’t know what I wanted at that point, apart from you, and my brain was still fighting with this concept of sacred bonds.’
‘Are you ever likely to let me forget that phrase?’ Letty teased as he shed his jacket and his shirt and dragged her down on the bed with him, solely to hold her close, both arms wrapped tightly and possessively round her while she continued to contemplate her glittering eternity ring with satisfaction.
‘Probably not. It doesn’t feel sacred to me, but then I’m too earthy for that kind of attitude,’ Leo murmured apologetically. ‘But when you’re not there, everything feels uncomfortable and lonely and depressing. When did you see that photo of Dido and me lunching?’
‘The first week we were apart,’ she said with regret.
‘I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to broach it on the phone. Didn’t it cross your mind that only a man in love phones you at least three times a day?’
‘Nope... I’ve no experience of men in love,’ she reminded him. ‘Oh, Leo, I’ve been such an idiot—and so unhappy without you.’
‘Well, you’re truly stuck with me now,’ Leo proclaimed with unashamed approval. ‘And, what’s more, we’re likely to have an enormous family because we are going to want to have children of our own, aren’t we?’
‘You mean, you’re actually comfortable with that idea?’ Letty asked in wonderment.
‘The more the merrier,’ Leo assured her. ‘I really love the kids. I know I’m selfish sometimes when it comes to you, but I really like having them in our life.’
‘That’s good because it’s likely to be years before you get a baby from me. I want to finish my training first,’ Letty informed him gently.
‘Enough talking and enough warnings...’ Leo covered her mouth with his in a long drugging kiss before breaking free to add, ‘We need some mistletoe downstairs. I want to watch my father trying to manoeuvre your mother under it.’
Letty rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a friendship, Leo...nothing else.’
‘Want to make a bet?’ Leo was convinced that, whether either party appreciated it or not, their res
pective parents were getting attached to each other and it was no surprise to Leo that, having finally been exposed to a normal middle-aged and kind-hearted woman, his father was attracted to her after so many years living with a brittle fashion queen many years his junior, who made constant demands for luxuries the older man could rarely afford to provide.
‘No, I don’t do bets,’ Letty told him circumspectly, circling his beautiful mouth with her own, nipping at his lower lip the way he had taught her because, yes, she was a very fast learner in some departments. ‘Allow me, though, to know my own mother better than you do...and she said, “Never ever again, that’s me done,” after divorcing Robbie.’
‘You haven’t a romantic bone in your body, Letty,’ Leo groaned.
‘I’ll put up the mistletoe for our benefit,’ she promised. ‘Goodness knows, I’ve got every other Christmas extra on display.’
‘Yes, I liked the giant reindeer and the elves.’
‘You mightn’t like them when you see what they cost.’
‘I don’t care. It all looks fantastic, like a real home, and I’ve never had that before,’ he told her huskily as he began to snake down the zip on her dress by tiny increments.
‘You’re breaking my heart, Leo...and being far too cool and subtle—just rip it off!’ Letty told him cheerfully. ‘I love you enough to forgive you anything... Well, just about...not other women—’
‘I’ve got you, and I don’t need anyone else. I love you more than I ever thought I could love anyone.’
Letty stretched luxuriantly, every romantic bone in her body that she denied twanging to that announcement but, true to her determination not to get slushy, she told him he was wearing too many clothes and it was remarkable how fast he got out of them.