The Secret Sanchez Heir

Abigail stared off now into the distance. She hadn’t drawn the curtains in the kitchen and she could see that, whilst the snow wasn’t getting any heavier, it was still falling, a flurry of white, shining and beautiful where the lights around the house illuminated the drift.

‘So...’ a familiar voice drawled from behind her.

Startled, Abigail saw Leandro’s reflection in the glass of the French doors through which she had been staring. He’d changed into a pair of black jeans and a long-sleeved black jumper, the sleeves of which had been pushed up to the elbows, and he was barefoot. It might be freezing outside, but this rolling country manor was heated to perfection. Her heart jumped and her mouth went dry as she turned slowly towards him.

‘I see you decided to stay rather than brave the snow in an attempt to get out of here. Wise decision.’

‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’ Abigail said jerkily—the first thing that came to her head.

‘You mean you’d hoped I’d gone to bed. Why’s that?’ Leandro strolled towards a platter of cold meats, made himself a clumsy sandwich and poured himself a glass of red wine, offering her one as well, an offer she refused.

She gazed at him helplessly as he sat at the kitchen table. She’d remembered the way his physical presence could affect her. She’d forgotten how much.

‘It’s awkward being here,’ she stammered, finally dropping into the chair opposite him and watching as he ate, his eyes flicking towards her every so often.

Leandro didn’t say anything. He thought that awkward didn’t begin to cover it, but the hand of fate worked in mysterious ways, and he wasn’t feeling uncomfortable with the situation at all.

Indeed, things were remarkably clear cut. Far clearer cut than they had been when they had been seeing one another a year and a half ago.

Then he had found himself, for the first time in his life, in a situation in which normal play had been suspended. The rules he had always applied to his life had taken a back seat and, even before his sister Cecilia had had her say, he had known that the relationship was entering unexplored territory. When he had first laid eyes on Abigail, he had known that he wanted her. Desire had hit him hard and fast and, never one to ignore the demands of his libido, he had done what he had always done, without beating round the bush or going down any nonsensical courtship route. He’d found her attractive and he’d wanted to bed her. A simple equation.

He hadn’t reckoned on her being a virgin and he wondered whether that had marked the beginning of all those subtle changes that had pulled him in and frankly terrified him at the same time.

She’d been cagey about her past and he hadn’t pressed her for detail, instinctively wanting to hang on to whatever safe ground he could. He hadn’t wanted her to start the whole confiding game, which always inevitably led to the sort of cloying situation that he found a huge turn-off. He’d sought to keep her at a distance because he could feel the compulsive drag of being pulled in and, subconsciously, that had seemed the safest way of fighting it.

He’d told himself that he wasn’t curious but, even while he’d been trying to hold her at arm’s length, he’d wanted to know everything about her, had wanted that act of possession.

Perhaps his sister had heard something in the way he had talked about Abigail down the phone. Why else would she have dug up all that dirt on her? He had known that Cecilia was possessive and he had always indulged that and understood the reason for it. He had been her anchor from the day she’d been born, but even so he had seen red when she had descended on his Manhattan apartment, clutching evidence of Abigail’s past, challenging him to continue seeing a woman who, if not an outright liar, had concealed the truth—and why else unless she was a gold-digger, playing the long game? He had walked away from the relationship without a backward glance. Problem was that his body hadn’t quite managed to forget her.

Which was why the woman had stayed in his head. Which was why, looking at her now, he could feel the slow burn of desire inside him.

She was unfinished business and he still wanted her. The blondes and eventually Rosalind had been sticking plaster over an open cut and now the sticking plaster had been ripped off. There was only one way the cut was going to be healed and that was to sleep for one last time with the woman who had delivered the damage.

Things were different now. He knew Abigail for who she was. Once upon a time, he had almost believed her to be the person she’d been pretending to be, but that was then. Now, he was in no danger of being sucked into anything.

‘It’s only awkward,’ Leandro drawled, ‘if you insist on dragging the past in. Personally, I’m the sort of guy who is happy to let bygones be bygones.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not interested in talking about why you did what you did.’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Abigail muttered in a driven undertone. ‘Okay, so I didn’t tell you about my background because I didn’t want to put you off. Why is that so hard for you to understand? I’m human. You were everything I wasn’t and I couldn’t believe that you’d even looked in my direction. I didn’t want to spoil the moment and then...things started getting serious and I just never seemed to know when to sit you down and explain that you might have got the wrong idea of who I was...’

Leandro flushed darkly. ‘Things got serious for you,’ he corrected coolly.

Abigail nodded. ‘I won’t sit here and pretend that they didn’t,’ she told him. ‘I felt things for you and, the more I felt for you, the harder it seemed to start telling you about myself and my foster homes and what it was like growing up in them.’

Her voice had sunk to a whisper and Leandro grimly fought off any inclination to feel sympathy for her. She deserved none, and too right he would have seen things slightly differently had he known just how desperate for money she had been. The only thing she hadn’t lied about had been her lack of sexual experience, and he’d wondered afterwards whether she’d been saving herself for the right billionaire to come along and elevate her to the status she felt she deserved. She’d certainly taken to the high life like a duck to water.

‘And what a stroke of bad luck,’ Leandro murmured smoothly, ‘to have ended up trying to get a job in one of the hotels I owned. The second Cecilia knew where we’d met, it would have been easy for her to work her way backwards and to have discovered the job you failed to secure because of the reference given by your ex-boss.’

‘He lied.’ Abigail had been so desperate to make him understand all those long months ago when his sister had confronted him in his apartment, but now she just felt tired of finding herself repeating the same old stuff all over again. It wasn’t as though he was going to listen now any more than he had then. In fact, if anything, she repulsed him more now than she would have then because, back then, they at least had been lovers and that would have counted for something, surely?

‘Of course,’ Leandro said soothingly. ‘Although I wouldn’t get too moral, if I were you, considering you weren’t far behind in the lying stakes...’

Abigail looked away.

‘And then there was a certain incident I unearthed about a spate of shoplifting for which you received a warning in the heady days of your misspent youth...’

Abigail’s eyes flew to his and she blanched, because this was news to her. ‘What? You had me checked out after we broke up?’

‘Call it curiosity.’ Because a part of him had wanted to believe her. He couldn’t credit himself for being the fool he’d been, but then he’d never felt for any other woman what he’d ended up feeling for her. The memory of that vulnerability made his teeth clench together in frustration and anger.

‘I remember that incident,’ Abigail said softly. Her eyes clouded over. ‘I was only twelve at the time and I was so desperate to fit in. I’d just been transferred to another foster home and...’ she sighed ‘... I just knew that the girls there weren’t going to accept me.’

Because of how she looked. It had always been about how she looked. Her face had attracted too much attention and, in her circumstances, attracting too much attention had never been a good thing.

‘A group of us had gone into the shopping centre for the morning. I’d tagged along, happy as anything that I’d been invited to be part of the crowd. When we got there, I only realised that the reason I’d been asked along had been so that they could make fun of me. They dared me to steal some cheap costume jewellery from one of the shops. They didn’t think I would, which was probably why I did.’

She glanced up at him ruefully. ‘I made a hopeless shoplifter. I couldn’t have been more obvious. Of course, I was caught as soon as I walked out, and hauled down to the police station and treated like a common criminal. It wasn’t even as though it made a spot of difference, because when I was returned to the home I still ended up standing out and being ostracised. But I learned my lesson, so that’s just one reason why I would never have stolen anything again.’

Leandro found that he didn’t like thinking of her as a kid in a police station, probably confused and scared. In fact, he found himself wishing that he could find whatever policeman had taken her in and beat the living daylights out of him, which was such a crazy reaction that he almost wanted to laugh.

It struck him, in a moment of blinding clarity, that the two of them might have come from wildly different backgrounds but that they had more in common than either of them might think.

Frowning at the sudden bout of introspection, Leandro relaxed back in the chair, topped up his wine glass and looked at her with brooding intensity. ‘Like I said, there’s nothing to be gained from trips down memory lane. Tell me what you’ve been up to since we parted company.’

Abigail stilled. She licked her lips nervously and made a big effort not to look away, because that would have been a sure sign of a guilty conscience, and she didn’t have a guilty conscience.

‘I... I managed to find the job I now have.’

She cleared her throat and looked at him as evenly as she could.

‘When I got back to London I was out of work, as you know, and I’d gone to a cafе to try and work out what to do next. I didn’t know who would employ me after that reference from my ex-boss. Who was going to believe me? Anyway, while I was having a cup of coffee Vanessa came in, and there were no free tables so she asked if she could sit at mine and, well, the rest is history, so to speak.’

She looked at him wryly and then said with some satisfaction, ‘I told her all about my past and the stupid lies that had been told about me and she believed me. She gave me a job on a trial basis and it worked out brilliantly, as it happens. I seem to have a knack for selling stuff, including high-end jewellery. None of which,’ she couldn’t help adding, ‘I have ever been tempted to stick in my handbag and take home with me.’

‘And men?’ Leandro decided that it was time to push on from a topic on which he had no intention of dwelling on for too long. What was done was done.

Abigail flushed a delicate pink.

‘I think it’s time for me to head upstairs now. I’m tired. I want to get a good night’s rest because I intend to leave first thing in the morning, and if the weather is still poor then Hal and I will just have to chance it.’

She stood up and neatened her outfit, which felt inappropriate, because she was no longer here on business. Her coat was upstairs in the bedroom suite which had been allocated to her, a sumptuous space that felt nearly as big as a football field. As were her handbag and the company laptop which she had brought with her. She had no idea what Leandro had done with the ring. Maybe he would hang onto it for his future wife.

‘Have there been other men?’

Abigail’s breathing hitched. He stood up and closed the distance between them. She stuck her hands behind her back because she wanted to reach out and flatten them against his broad chest and feel the hardness of muscle and sinew underneath the black jumper. She wanted to fly back in time but that was impossible.

She thought of Sam, innocently lying in his cot back in London, and the series of decisions she had made when she had discovered that she was pregnant. Fear threatened to swamp her, fear and guilt. because, although she had been torn apart at the time, wondering whether she had made the right choice to keep the pregnancy a secret from Leandro, it had been relatively easy to live with her decision because it meant she could relegate their relationship to the past. In her head, she had kept open the option to get in touch with him at some point in the future, but she had lived for the present and so that point in the future had been nothing more than theoretical.

But the future had crashed into the present, challenging that decision she had taken and filling her with dread at just how close she was now to a conflagration that could get out of control.