CHAPTER SIX
‘I’M JUST not like that. He might be my husband, but that doesn’t give him the right to walk all over me. I’m not going to let him hurt me a second time.’ Millie stuffed baby clothes into a holdall. ‘That would make me stupid, wouldn’t it?’
The baby cooed and kicked his legs.
‘We’re just wrong for each other. Why can’t he see that? There’s no point in me trying to talk to him about this because he’s good with words and I’m not. With any luck he won’t follow me. He didn’t follow me the first time and I can’t believe he wants a baby cramping his lifestyle.’ Millie thought about the actress and then wished she hadn’t. ‘It isn’t easy being married to a man every woman in the world wants. Unless you’re the woman every man in the world wants. And I’m not.’ Dwelling on that dismal thought, she closed the bag.
‘“I expect my wife to stand by my side no matter what.” Obviously I’m expected to watch while he smiles at models and actresses.’ She stowed the bag under the cot out of sight. ‘Well, I can’t do that. I’ve spent a year trying to get over him. I’m not putting myself through that again.’
‘What are you not putting yourself through again?’ Leandro stood in the doorway and Millie jumped.
‘B-being chased by j-journalists,’ she stammered. Her heart thumping, smothered with guilt, she scooped Costas up in her arms and then faced Leandro.
He was dressed in black jeans and a casual shirt and he looked every bit as sexy as he did in a suit.
No wonder she hadn’t been able to hold him, she thought miserably. He was stunning.
She’d be doing him a favour by leaving.
He didn’t want her and he didn’t want a baby.
He wanted a life.
Clearly undisturbed by her emotional turbulence, Costas fell asleep on her shoulder and Leandro gave a faint smile.
‘Someone is tired. Put him to bed and come and eat. We need to make plans.’
It obviously hadn’t occurred to him that she might refuse.
Faced with no alternative, Millie followed him to the dining room, but she was too nervous to eat and too nervous to talk. Pushing the food around her plate, her mind explored the safest route and means of transport.
Leandro lounged across from her, relaxed and watchful, as if he was trying to get inside her head.
Millie was frantically searching for reasons not to share his bed when a member of staff approached him and delivered a message.
His mouth tightening, Leandro stood up and dropped his napkin on the table. ‘I apologise. This is one call I have to take. After this there will be no more, I promise.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll go and check on Costas.’
Almost weak with relief, Millie seized on the excuse to go and hide away with the baby. Maybe she should leave now, except that it was too late in the day and the trains would soon stop running.
No, it had to be tomorrow. But early.
Exhausted after the events of the past few days, she lay down on the bed in Costas’s room and immediately fell asleep.
Leandro opened the door of the baby’s room, his mouth tightening as he saw Millie asleep on the bed. Her hair was loose and tangled, her cheeks prettily flushed and her body curled up, very much like the baby who slept in the cot next to her.
She was avoiding sex again, he thought grimly. The obvious reason was that she hadn’t forgiven him for his ‘affair’ with her sister, but Leandro knew that their problems went much deeper than that. She’d been avoiding sex long before the ‘pool incident’ as he now called it.
But whatever the reason, in the end she’d walked out. To him, that was an unpardonable sin that nothing could excuse.
Cold fingers of the past slid over his shoulder and he
shrugged them away, refusing to dwell anywhere other than the present. That was what he did, wasn’t it? He moved forwards. Always, he moved forwards.
Was that why he was so angry with Millie? Because her actions had forced him to remember a time that he’d tried to forget?
His disappointment in her was as fresh today as it had been a year ago.