She laid her fork alongside her abandoned knife and leaned back in her chair. So much for a quiet dinner à deux and the chance for a serious talk. She almost rubbed her forehead to see if the word gullible was carved there.
Surreptitiously she watched Leo speak with an older woman seated on his left. His tux jacket, removed prior to appetisers being served, hung from his chair, leaving his wide shoulders and lean torso sheathed in a white wing tip shirt that contrasted with his olive skin and black hair. He bowed his head, murmuring something that elicited a bright tinkle of laughter from the woman, and the sound scraped across Helena’s nerves.
Age, evidently, was no barrier to his charms.
She averted her gaze, smothered the impulse to get up and flee. Like it or not, she’d agreed to be here and she would not scarper like a coward. If she was smart, bided her time, she might still persuade Leo to hold his plans for her father’s company. A few weeks...that was all she needed. Time to make her mother see sense before—
‘Bored?’
Leo’s deep voice sliced across her thoughts.
She drummed up a smile. ‘Of course not.’
‘Good.’ His long fingers toyed with the stem of his wineglass. ‘I would hate to bore you for a second time in your life.’
Helena’s smile faltered. His casually delivered words carried a meaning she couldn’t fail to comprehend. Not when her own words—words she’d bet every hard-earned penny in her bank account had hurt her more than they’d hurt him—were embedded like thorns in her memory. I’m bored, Leo. Really. This relationship just isn’t working for me.
She shifted in her seat, her face heating. ‘That’s unfair.’ She glanced around the table, pitching her voice for his ears alone. ‘I tried once to explain why I said those things.’
After he’d left that awful message on her phone—telling her what her father had done, accusing her of betrayal and complicity—she’d gone to his hotel room and banged on his door until her hand throbbed and a man from a neighbouring room stepped out and shot her a filthy look.
‘You didn’t want to listen.’
He shrugged. ‘I was angry,’ he stated, as if he need offer no further excuse.
‘You still are.’
‘Perhaps. But now I’m listening.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Try me.’
She arched an eyebrow. He wanted to do this now? Here? She cast another furtive glance around the table. Fine.
‘I needed you to let me go without a fight,’ she said, her voice a decibel above a whisper. ‘And we both know you wouldn’t have. Not without questions. Not unless I—’ She stopped, a hot lump of regret lodging in her throat.
‘Stamped on my pride?’ he finished for her.
Her face flamed hotter. Must he make her sound so cruel? So heartless? She’d been nineteen, for pity’s sake, staring down the barrel of her father’s ultimatum. Get rid of the damned foreigner, girl—or I will. Naive. That was what she’d been. And unforgivably stupid, thinking she could live beyond the reach of her father’s iron control.
She smoothed her napkin over her knees. ‘I did what I thought was best at the time.’
‘For you or for me?’
‘For us both.’
‘Ah. So you were being...how do you English like to say it...cruel to be kind?’
His eyes drilled into hers, but she refused to flinch from his cutting glare. She didn’t need his bitter accusations. She, too, had paid a price, and however much she longed to turn back the clock, undo the damage, she could not relieve the pain of her past. Not when she’d worked so hard, sacrificed so much, to leave it behind.
She mustered another smile, this one urbane and slightly aloof—the kind her mother often wore in public. ‘Hans and Sabine seem like a nice couple. Have you known them long?’
The change of subject earned her a piercing stare. She held her breath. Would he roll with it?
Then, ‘Nine years.’
He spoke curtly, but still she breathed again, relaxed a little. Perhaps a normal conversation wasn’t impossible? ‘You never talked much about your sister,’ she ventured. ‘Sabine mentioned surgery. Is Marietta unwell?’