‘That’s called being fair.’
‘That’s called being a creep. You’re just a different kind of creep, Leo!’
Leo flushed darkly, outraged at having had what he considered to be his impeccably fair reputation dragged down into the dirt in the matter of a single sentence. Against his better judgement, he began to rapidly revise his satisfied acceptance that what he had confronted in the sitting room was a distraught Heather offloading on his no-good brother. What if she had already been subconsciously comparing him to Alex? Was Alex a creep? No. To her, he would have seemed as wholesome as freshly baked bread with his ‘let’s hold hands and discuss our feelings’ approach.
Jealousy and possessiveness, two weaknesses he had always prided himself on not having, rose in him like a red mist. To top it all off, his brother at that very instant had the barefaced cheek to tell him, ‘Perhaps you should take time out and, hey, maybe listen to what someone else has to say for a change?’
‘And maybe you should listen, little brother. She’s off-limits.’
‘Hello?’ Heather interjected furiously at Leo’s ferocious verbal warning to his brother. ‘Are you talking about me? Because, if you are, I just want to remind you that I’m not your property, Leo!’
‘You’re in love with me!’
Heather fell silent, cursing the one, wild moment in time when she had been drawn to be honest with him. Now, he was using her love against her. Tears of hurt and betrayal stung the back of her eyes, and she looked down at her feet, willing herself to fight against the temptation to really let the side down by crying. Once, in front of Alex, had been quite enough.
And I’m not about to let you go. That thought sliced through Leo’s consciousness like a razor blade, shearing away at his fundamental acceptance that the chosen path of his life was to remain free of the encumbrance of a woman tied to him by a band of gold. He had his son. It was enough. He was not even aware that he had spoken his thoughts out loud until Heather, standing as still as a statue, asked him to repeat what he had said.
‘You’re right,’ he told her, walking towards where she had managed to field him off by edging towards the mantelpiece. He was no longer aware of his brother. It was as if a genie in a lamp had magically made him disappear. There was a roaring in his ears, but still he felt good. Calm. ‘I’m a different kind of creep.’
‘Wha…?’ The whole parallel-universe thing was happening again. She wanted to move out of Leo’s reach, but her feet stubbornly refused to oblige. What had he been talking about when he had said that he refused to let her go? Had she heard correctly? Her heart was beating so fast that she felt faint. Or maybe it was just the way he was staring at her, his fabulous eyes reaching down into the depths of her and stirring everything around. It was so unfair that this was what love was all about: allowing someone in who had the power to scramble your brains.
‘I am prepared to make a commitment to you,’ Leo announced with largesse.
‘You’re “prepared to make a commitment” to me?’
‘Correct,’ Leo asserted.
‘What sort of commitment?’ Heather asked faintly.
‘Are there different kinds?’ He frowned, just a tiny bit thrown by her lack of a suitably rapturous response.
‘Yes, there are different kinds!’ Heather was compelled to point out, because her mind, which had turned to cotton wool for a moment, was finally cranking back into gear and warning her that their definitions of commitment would almost certainly not coincide. Leo’s idea of commitment would be, in his opinion, to generously allocate a few months rather than a few weeks to a relationship, and to maybe tone down the tenor of his remarks when discussing any plans that stretched beyond a two-day time limit. Accept that, her mind was telling her, and she would be no better off than she was now. In fact, she’d be worse off, because she would have longer to fall even deeper in love with him.
‘How so?’ Leo demanded, but cautiously.
‘You know how I feel about relationships,’ Heather told him quietly.
‘Then maybe,’ he said in an undertone, ‘we should get married.’ He was gratified by the alteration in her expression. After everything he had been through over the past few days, he had never expected to land up in this place, and from the look of it neither had she. It was as if suddenly he was released to have her, and any misgivings about finding himself in such wildly unexpected terrain were wiped out by the knowledge that she was now his.
Predictably, he felt his body harden as his imagination ran amok, conjuring up pleasurable images of exploring her naked body, tasting her, losing himself in her fabulous curves. His eyes smouldered in anticipation of touching her, but for the moment he interrupted her stupefied, gaping silence to say quietly, ‘I’ll leave you to think about it, hmm?’ He reached out and curled a finger into her hair, and admitted what he had been so strenuously denying for days—that, yes, she took his breath away. ‘Because now there are things that have to be said between my brother and me.’
Think about it? Heather was in a daze. She felt as though, if she probed too deeply into his extravagant proposal—which seemed so out of keeping with everything she had assumed about him—then it would disappear like dew on a hot summer day.
‘But—’
‘No buts.’ He kissed her parted mouth, a kiss that was both chaste and deeply, deeply sexy at the same time.
‘Okay.’ Heather sighed when his lips finally left hers.
‘And we’ll talk…later.’
Afterwards, a mere three hours that felt like three decades, Heather wondered what that promised land would have looked like had fate not decided to show her, had not guided her foolish steps back to that sitting room with two mugs of coffee to find that the door was ajar, just a slither. Just enough for her to overhear a conversation that was as destructive as a hammer shattering a pane of glass.
Sitting in her cottage while the clock chimed midnight she wished she could cry, but she was all cried out for the moment—although she suspected that, when the tears finally came, they would never stop. She would just drown in her own self-made misery.
CHAPTER TEN
THE past three hours had been cathartic for Leo. Indeed, he felt as though he had been sucked into a whirlpool, spun around at dangerous speed and then spat out. He had been stripped of his cynicism; of course it would return in time, because that was part and parcel of his personality, but right at the moment he felt weirdly exposed.
He also still had to talk to Heather. He was looking forward to it. In fact, he couldn’t wait.
Having become accustomed to her being under the same roof as him, it was only when he was virtually outside the door to the room she had used while she had been in his mother’s house that it struck Leo that she wouldn’t be there. She naturally had returned to her cottage. He spun round on his heels and took the stairs two at a time, leaving the house as quietly as he could and choosing to walk to her place, giving himself a head start on collating his thoughts.
Although it was after two in the morning, he didn’t feel in the least tired. In fact, he felt fantastically alive, and filled with a driving sense of purpose. Although it made more sense to wait until morning, because she would probably be fast asleep at this hour, Leo felt compelled to see her as soon as was physically possible. He didn’t doubt for a single second that she would feel exactly the same way about seeing him.
As expected, her cottage was in complete darkness, but he didn’t hesitate to ring the doorbell, and was slightly surprised, although pleasantly so, when she answered the door within minutes. Nor did she look as though she had been dragged out of bed. In fact, she looked as alert as he felt, which was great.
Leo grinned and stepped forward. ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’
Wake her? Not much chance of that when she had spent hours replaying in her mind those stolen snippets of revealing conversation which she had overheard before she had fled. No, she had had no more chance of sleeping with so much on her mind than if Daniel had set up camp in her bedroom to play his drums.
Besides, it seemed a moot point whether he had woken her or not, because he was already inserting himself beyond the door, shouldering his way into the cottage.
Heather cravenly wished that he would just disappear, leaving her some more time to sort out in her head what she was going to say to him. When fate decided to play games, she thought, heart beating a frantic tempo, it certainly didn’t cut corners. Leo was the opposite of the disappearing man—he was standing in her hallway, one hundred percent vital, insanely sexy male.
‘I’m glad you came.’ Heather found her voice and made it sound as cool as possible, although her fingers were knotted nervously behind her back as she watched him remove his weatherbeaten, tan leather bomber-jacket and sling it over the banister.
In the cold light of reality, she had taken time to consider his extraordinary marriage proposal. It had been the last thing she had expected, and she was ashamed now at how eagerly she had allowed herself to believe that he had really meant it. Leo had never once talked to her about a future, not even when their relationship had been at its rosiest. In fact, he had been positively scathing about such a concept applied to him and any woman. Nor had he given her any inclination, when she had told him about his mother’s assumptions—when she had confessed her love—that he was willing to commit to what they had and give it a fair go to see where it ended up. No, he had been more than willing to walk off into the sunset, leaving her to deal with her broken heart.