Bought To Wear The Billionaire's Ring

Extract

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_b2ab1b99-ebe0-5c59-896f-c5e1ea1901f3)

‘SO...’ LEO MORGAN-WHITE handed his father a glass of claret and sat down opposite him.

Harold had travelled all the way from Devon and had been delivered only half an hour previously by his chauffeur. It had been a surprise visit, which he had been told by his agitated father the evening before couldn’t wait.

Despite this, they had yet to get down to business and, although Leo knew what it concerned, he was still puzzled as to why it couldn’t have waited until the weekend when he would gladly have travelled to Devon.

But his father was emotional and impulsive and so it was nigh on impossible to gauge just how important his news actually was. Leo couldn’t think that it would be important enough to have him rushing up to London, a city he tried to avoid at all costs.

‘Too noisy,’ he was fond of complaining. ‘Too crowded. Too polluted. Too many expensive shops selling nonsense. A man can’t hear himself think there! You know what I say, Leo—if you can’t hear the grass growing, you’re in the wrong place!’

‘What’s going on?’ Leo now asked, reclining back and stretching out his long legs. He carefully placed his glass on the table next to him and linked his fingers loosely on his stomach.

His father’s eyes were glistening and he looked on the verge of bursting into tears. His chin was wobbling and his breathing was suspiciously uneven. Leo knew from experience that it was always better to ignore these signs of an imminent breakdown and focus on what needed to be discussed. His father needed very little encouragement when it came to shedding tears.

It was a trait Leo had thankfully not inherited. Indeed, anyone would have been forgiven for thinking that the two were not related at all as, both temperamentally and physically, they couldn’t have been more different.

Where Leo was long, lean and darkly handsome, a legacy from his Spanish-born mother, his father was of an average height and rotund.

And where Leo was cool, composed and cut-throat, his father was unapologetically emotional and fond of dramatic outbursts. Leo’s mother had died a little over a decade ago, when Leo had been twenty-two, and he remembered her as a tall, ridiculously good-looking woman who, having inherited her family’s business at the tender age of nineteen, had been very clever, very shrewd and who had a natural flair for running a company. On paper, she and his father should have had nothing in common and yet theirs had been a match made in heaven.

In an age where men went out to work and women kept the home fires burning, his home life had been the opposite. His mother had run the family business, which she had brought from Spain with her, while his father, a hugely successful author, had stayed at home and written.

In a weird and wonderful way, opposite poles had attracted.

Leo loved his father deeply and his eyes narrowed as Harold carefully took a sheet of paper from his pocket and pushed it across the table to his son.

He fluttered one hand and looked away, before saying in a shaky voice, ‘That woman has emailed me this...’

Leo eyed the sheet of paper but didn’t reach for it. ‘I’ve told you that you need to stop getting yourself worked up about this, Dad. I have my lawyers working on it. It’s all going to be all right. You just have to be patient. The woman can fight all she likes but she won’t be getting anywhere.’

‘Just you read what she has to say, Leo. I...I can’t bring myself to read it out loud.’

Leo sighed. ‘How is the book coming along?’

‘Don’t try and distract me,’ his father responded mournfully. ‘I haven’t been able to write a word. I’ve been too worried about this business to spare a thought for how DI Tracey is going to solve the case. In fact, I don’t care! At this rate, I may never put pen to paper again. It’s all very well for you business types...adding up numbers and sitting round conference tables...’

Leo stifled a smile. He was worth billions and did a lot more than just add up numbers and sit round conference tables.

‘She’s made threats,’ Harold said, sucking in a shaky breath. ‘You read the email, Leo. The woman says she’s going to fight for custody and she’s going to win. She says she’s spoken to her lawyer and although Sean stated in his will that Adele was to come to you if anything happened to him, Louise never agreed and now they’re both gone. All that matters is that Adele’s well-being would be put in jeopardy if she stays with that woman.’

‘Heard it all before.’ Leo drained his claret and stood up, massaging the back of his neck as he strolled towards the expanse of glass that separated him from the busyness of London which never stopped, even in the most prestigious of postcodes.

His apartment occupied the top two floors of an impressive Georgian building. He had hired the most prestigious architect in the city who had cleverly used the vast space to create an elegant blend of old and new, leaving the coving and fireplaces and ceiling details intact while changing pretty much everything else. The result was an airy, four-bedroomed testament to what could be done when money was no object.

The walls were adorned with priceless modern art. The decor was muted—shades of grey and cream. People’s mouths fell open the second they walked through the door but Leo was barely aware of his surroundings. They didn’t intrude and that was the main thing.

‘This is different, Leo.’

‘Dad,’ he said patiently, ‘it’s not. Gail Jamieson wants to hang on to her granddaughter for dear life because she thinks it’s a conduit to my money but she’s utterly ill-equipped to look after a five-year-old child. She’ll be especially ill-equipped when my money stops and she has to fend for herself. The fact is...this is a case I will win. I don’t want to throw money at the woman but if I have to, I will. She’ll take it and head for the hills because, like her daughter before her, Gail is a money-grabbing gold-digger who’s not above manipulating a situation for her own advantage. Need I remind you of the train of events that led Sean to Australia?’

His father grunted and Leo didn’t push it. They both knew Sean for the man he had been.

Seven years younger than Leo, Sean had arrived on their doorstep at the age of sixteen, along with his mother, Georgia Ryder, with whom Leo’s father had fallen head over heels in love less than a year after Leo’s mother had died.

From the very beginning Sean, an incredibly pretty boy with overlong blond hair and light blue eyes, had been lazy and spoiled. Once his mother had a ring on her finger and free access to the Morgan-White millions, he had quickly become even more demanding and petulant. His studies had fallen by the wayside and, cosseted by his mother, he had spent his time hanging around with a gang of like-minded teenagers who had gravitated towards him like bees round a honeypot. It hadn’t been long before drugs had crept into the scene.

Leo’s father, with the ink on the marriage certificate barely dry, had woken up from his grief-induced daze and realised the size of the mistake he had made. He didn’t want a blonde bombshell twenty years his junior pretending to love him when the only thing she loved was his money. He wanted to mourn the passing of the woman he had loved. He wanted uninterrupted misery.

Leo had taken Sean to one side and had given him the talking-to of his life, which had done no good at all. The opposite. Within two years Sean had dropped out of school. Within four, he had become heavily involved with Louise Jamieson, an enthusiastic member of the club for losers to which he belonged, and by the time his mother, after a series of unabashed flings with men her own age, had quit her marriage to Harold and begun her bid for as much alimony as she could get, Sean had moved to Australia with a heavily pregnant wife.

By this time Leo’s father had all but given up. His writing had stopped completely and his editor’s frantic communications had remained unanswered. He had become a virtual recluse and Leo had been left to pick up the pieces.

Unchecked, Georgia had spent vast sums of money on everything under the sun, from diamonds and tiaras to horses, cars and exotic holidays abroad, while she still had access to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s bank accounts. She had lavished money on her son. Leo, building his own career, had not had his eye sufficiently on the ball to have stopped the momentum.

By the time the nuts and bolts of the messy divorce had been ironed out, his father had been left with a bank account that had been severely dented. The fact that he hadn’t put pen to paper for years hadn’t helped.

Then Georgia was catapulted to her death off a hairpin bend on a road while vacationing in Italy with the money she had squeezed out of Harold. Left to make the decision, Leo would have thrown Sean to the wolves but his father, much softer and with a conscience that could be pricked by almost anything, had continued to send money to his former stepson. He had dug deep to make sure Sean’s daughter had all the things he would have given her, had she lived in the same country. He had begged for photos and had been thrilled with the handful of pictures Sean had emailed over.

He had tried to make plans to visit but Sean had always had an excuse.

Georgia had been a disaster and her son had been no less of a catastrophe and, unlike his sentimental father, Leo wasn’t going to allow emotions to hold sway over the outcome of this bizarre custody battle.

He would win because he always won. Louise’s mother, whom he had met once when he went to Australia, had confirmed all his suspicions that the last thing she was concerned about was the welfare of her grandchild. She was an appalling woman and no appalling woman was going to get the better of him.

‘She says that it doesn’t matter how much money you have to fight this, Leo. She’s going to win because you’re not fit to be a father to Adele.’

Leo stilled. His father’s eyes had welled up. Reluctantly, he retrieved the paper from where his father had earlier shoved it to him and carefully read the email that had been sent by Ms Jamieson.

‘Now you see what I mean, Leo.’ His father’s voice shook. ‘And the woman has a point. You have to see that.’

‘I see nothing of the sort.’

‘You don’t lead a responsible life.’ Harold’s voice firmed. ‘Not as far as bringing up a young child is concerned. You spend half your life out of the country...’

‘How else am I supposed to run my companies?’ Leo interjected, enraged that a woman who appeared to have the morals of a sewer rat should dare to criticise him. ‘From an armchair at home?’

‘That’s not the point. The point is that you do spend a great part of the year out of the country. How is that supposed to be good for the well-being of a five-year-old child? Furthermore, she’s not wrong when she says that you...’ His hands fluttered in a gesture of resignation and disappointment.

Leo’s mouth thinned. He knew that the choices he made when it came to women did not fill his father’s heart with glee. He knew that Harold would have done anything to have seen him happily settled down with a nice, respectable girl who would have those home fires burning for him when he returned home after a long day toiling in the fields.

It wasn’t going to happen. Leo had too much first-hand experience of how life could be derailed when emotions got in the way of common sense and good judgement. No matter that his father had adored his wife—when Mariela Morgan-White had died, he had been left a broken man. Yes, some idiots might fall for that hoary old chestnut about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but Leo had never signed up to that.

His father might not have agreed with Leo’s choices but he had stopped trying to take him to task about them, and this was the first time in years that he had voiced his disappointment.