Читать книгу Deal With The Devil: Secrets of a Ruthless Tycoon / The Most Expensive Lie of All / The Magnate's Manifesto - Кэтти Уильямс, Michelle Conder, Cathy Williams - Страница 10

CHAPTER FOUR

‘WHEN?’ HE SLID out of the bed, strolled towards the window and stared down to a snowy, grey landscape. The sun had barely risen but, yes, the snow appeared to be lessening.

This was the reason he was here, pretending to be someone he wasn’t. When he had first arrived, he had wondered how a meeting with his mother could possibly be engineered in a town where everyone seemed to know everyone else. Several lies down and his quarry would be delivered right to his doorstep. Didn’t fate work in mysterious ways?

Brianna, sitting up, wondered what was going through his head.

‘For the moment, they’re going to transfer her to another ward and then, provided the snow doesn’t get worse, they’re going to bring her here tomorrow. You’re making me nervous, standing by the window like that. What are you thinking? I have room here at the pub. It won’t make any difference to you. You won’t have to vacate your room—in fact, you probably won’t even notice that she’s here. I shall have her in the spare room next to my bedroom so that I can keep a constant eye on her, and of course I doubt she’ll be able to climb up and down stairs.’

Leo smiled and pushed himself away from the window ledge. When he tried to analyse what he felt about his birth mother, the most he could come up with was a scathing contempt which he realised he would have to attempt to conceal for what remained of his time here. Brianna might have painted a different picture, but years of preconceived notions were impossible to put to bed.

‘So...’ He slipped back under the covers and pulled her towards him. ‘If we’re going to have an unexpected visitor, then maybe you should start telling me the sort of person I can look forward to meeting and throw me a few more details...’

* * *

Brianna began plating their breakfast. Was it her imagination or was he abnormally interested in finding out about Bridget? He had returned to the bed earlier and she had thrown him a few sketchy details about her friend yet, off and on, he seemed to return to the subject. His questions were in no way pressing; in fact, he barely seemed to care about the answer.

A sudden thought occurred to her.

Was he really worried that their wonderful one-on-one time might be interrupted? He had made it perfectly clear that he was just passing through, and had given her a stern warning that she was not to make the mistake of investing in him, yet was he becoming possessive of her company without even realising it himself?

For reasons best known to himself, he was a commitment-phobe, but did he respond out of habit? Had he warned her off because distancing himself was an automatic response?

He might not want to admit it, but over the past few days they had got to know one another in a way she would never have thought possible. He worked while she busied herself with the accounts and the bookkeeping but, for a lot of the time, they had communicated. He had even looked at her ledgers, leading her to think that he might have been an accountant in a previous life. He had suggested ways to improve her finances. He had persuaded her to show him all the paintings she had ever done, which she kept in portfolios under the bed, and had urged her to design a website to showcase them. She had caught herself telling him so much more than she had ever told anyone in her life before, even her close friends. He made a very good listener.

His own life, he had confided, had been as uneventful as it came: middle class, middle of the road. Both of them were single children, both without parents. They laughed at the same things; they bickered over the remote control for the television in the little private lounge which was set aside for the guests, on those rare occasions she had some. With the pub closed, they had had lots of quality time during which to get to know one another.

So was he scared that the arrival of Bridget would signal the end of what they had?

With a sigh, she acknowledged that if the ambulance could make it up the lane to the pub to deliver their patient then her loyal customers could certainly make it as well. The pub would once again reopen and their time together would certainly be curtailed.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said slowly, handing him a plate of bacon, eggs and toast and sitting down. ‘I might just keep the pub closed for a couple of weeks. Until the snow is well and truly over and the path outside the pub is completely safe.’

She told herself that this was something that made perfect sense. And why shouldn’t she have a little break? The last break she had had was over summer when she had grabbed a long weekend to go to Dublin with her friends. At other times, while they’d been off having lovely warm holidays in sunny Spain or Portugal, she had always been holed up at the pub, unable to take the time off because she couldn’t afford to lose the revenue.

So why shouldn’t she have time off now? A couple of weeks wouldn’t break the bank—at least, not completely. And she would make up for it later in the year. Leo had suggested a website to promote the pub and she would take him up on that. He had intimated that she could really take off with only minimal changes, a few things to bring the place up to date.

And, if she closed the pub for a couple of weeks, they would continue to have their quality time until he disappeared.

‘It would be better for Bridget as well,’ she hurried on, not wanting to analyse how much of this idea was down to her desire to keep him to herself for a little longer. ‘She’s going to need looking after, at least in the beginning, and it would give me the opportunity to really take care of her without having to worry about running the pub as well.’

‘Makes sense, I suppose...’

‘You won’t be affected at all.’

‘I know. You’ve already told me.’

‘And I don’t want you to think that your needs are going to be overlooked. I mean, what I’m trying to say is...’

Leo tilted his head to one side. She blushed very easily. Especially when you considered the hard life she had had and the financial worries she had faced. No one would ever be able to accuse her of not being a fighter.

‘Is that you’ll carry on making my breakfast for me? Fixing me sandwiches for lunch? Slaving over a recipe book for something to cook for dinner? Making sure my bed is...warm and that you’re in it?’

‘I’m not part of a package deal.’ Brianna bristled, suddenly offended at the picture he painted of her. ‘You haven’t paid for me along with the breakfast, lunch and dinner.’ She stood up and began clearing the dishes, only pausing when she felt his arms around her at the sink. When she looked straight ahead, she could see their dim reflection in the window pane, his head downbent, buried in her hair. He didn’t like it when she tied it back so she had left it loose the past couple of days and now he wound one of the long, auburn strands around his finger.

His other hand reached underneath the sweater and she watched their hazy reflection, the movement of his hand caressing her breast, playing with her nipple, rubbing the pad of his thumb over it. Liquid pooled between her legs, dampening her underwear and making her squirm and shift in his embrace.

She could feel his hard arousal nudging her from behind and, when she half-closed her eyes, her imagination took flight, dwelling on the image of her touching him there, licking and sucking with his fingers tangled in her hair. She wanted to do the same now. She pictured him kneeling like a penitent at her feet, her body pressing against the wall in her bedroom, her legs parted as he tasted her.

He seemed to have the ability to make her stop thinking the second he laid a finger on her and he did it as easily as someone switching a tap off.

She watched, eyes smoky with desire, as he pushed the jumper up; now she could see the pale skin of her stomach and his much darker hands on her breasts, massaging them, teasing them, playing with her swollen, sensitive nipples.

She shuddered and angled her neck so that he could kiss her.

‘I know you’re not part of the package,’ he murmured. ‘And, just to set the record straight, I enjoy you a hell of a lot more than I enjoy the meals you prepare.’

‘Are you implying that I’m a bad cook?’ He had undone the top button of her jeans and she wriggled as he did the same with the zip, easing the jeans down over her slim hips, exposing her pale pink briefs.

‘You’re a fantastic cook. One of the best.’ He stood back slightly so that she could swivel to face him.

‘You’re a terrible liar.’

Leo flushed guiltily at this unwittingly inaccurate swipe, said in jest.

‘Don’t bank on that,’ he murmured into her ear. ‘You forget that I’ve already warned you that I’m a ruthless bastard.’

‘If you really were a ruthless bastard, then you wouldn’t have to warn me. I’d see all the giveaway signs.’ She tiptoed and drew his head down so that she could kiss him. Her body was heating up, impatiently anticipating the moment when it could unite with his.

In the heat of passion, it was always him who thought about protection. So he was scrupulous when it came to taking no chances—that didn’t mean that he wasn’t becoming more attached to her, did it? The fact he didn’t want an unwanted pregnancy any more than she did, didn’t indicate that his nomadic lifestyle wasn’t undergoing a subtle ground-change...

‘Touch me,’ he commanded roughly and he rested his hands on her hips and half-closed his eyes as she burrowed underneath his jumper, her hands feathering across his chest, pausing to do wonderful things to his nipples. He was breathing quickly, every sinew and muscle stretched to a point of yearning that made a nonsense of his legendary self-control.

He yanked his jumper off and heard her sigh with pleasure, a little, soft sigh that was uniquely hers. His eyes were still half-closed and he inhaled slightly to accommodate her fumbling fingers as they travelled downwards to unbutton and unzip his jeans.

Outside a watery sun was making itself known, pushing through the blanket of leaden grey of the past few days. Like an unfamiliar visitor, it threaded its way tentatively into the kitchen, picking up the rich hues of her hair and the smooth, creamy whiteness of her skin.

He stilled as she lowered herself to begin pulling down his jeans, taking his boxers with them until they were at his ankles and he stepped out of them and kicked them to one side.

He couldn’t withhold his grunt of intense satisfaction as she began delicately to lick the tip of his erection. He was so aroused that it was painful and as he looked down at the crown of her head, and her pink, darting tongue as it continued to tease him, he became even more aroused.

‘You’re driving me crazy, woman...’ His voice was unsteady, as were his hands as he coiled his fingers into her hair.

Brianna didn’t say anything. His nakedness had her firing on all cylinders and his vulnerability, glimpses of which she only caught when they were making love, was the most powerful of aphrodisiacs. She took him in her mouth, loving the way every atom of pleasure seemed to be transmitted from him to her via invisible, powerful pathways. As she sucked and teased, her hands caressed, and she was aware of his big, strong body shaking ever so slightly. How could he make her feel so powerful and so helpless at the same time?

She was so damp, her body so urgent for his, that she itched to rip off her clothes. Her jumper was back in place and it felt heavy and uncomfortable against her sensitised skin. She gasped as he pulled her up, and she obediently lifted her arms so that he could remove the offending jumper. The cool air hit her heated breasts like a soothing balm.

‘I can’t make it to the bedroom...’ He breathed heavily as she wriggled out of the jeans and then he hoisted her onto the kitchen table, shoving aside the remnants of their breakfast—the jar of marmalade, the little ceramic butter dish, the striped jug with milk. Surprisingly, nothing crashed to the ground in the process.

When he stood back, he marvelled at the sight of her naked beauty: her arms outstretched, her eyes heavy with the same lust that was coursing through his bloodstream like an unstoppable virus.

Her vibrant hair streamed out around her, formed a tangle over one breast, and the glimpse of a pink nipple peeping out was like something from an erotic X-rated magazine. Her parted legs were an invitation he couldn’t refuse, nor was his body allowing him the luxury of foreplay. As she raised her knees, he embedded himself into her in one hard, forceful thrust and then he lifted her up and drove again into her, building a furious rhythm and somehow ending up with her pressed against the kitchen wall, her legs wrapped around him.

Her hair trailed over her shoulder, down her back, a silky mass of rich auburn. He felt her in every part of him in a way that had never happened with any woman before. He didn’t get it, but he liked it. He was holding her underneath her sexy, rounded bottom and as he thrust long and deep into her he looked down at her little breasts bouncing in time to their bodies. The tips of her nipples were stiff and swollen, the big, flattened pink discs encircling them swollen and puffy. Every square inch of her body was an unbelievable turn-on and, even as he felt the satiny tightness of her sheath around him, he would have liked to close his mouth over one of those succulent nipples so that he could feast on its honeyed sweetness.

They came as one, their bodies fused, their breathing mirroring each other.

‘That was...indescribable.’ He eased her down and they stood facing one another, completely naked. Sanity began restoring itself, seeping through the haze of his hot, replete satisfaction. He swore under his breath and turned away. ‘The condom...it seems to have split...’

Brianna’s eyes widened with shock. She went over to her bundle of clothes and began getting dressed. He looked horrified. There was a heavy, laden silence as he likewise began getting dressed.

‘It’s okay. It takes more than one mistake for a person to get pregnant! If you read any magazine there are always stories of women trying for months, years, to conceive...’ Her menstrual cycle had always been erratic so it was easy to believe that.

Leo shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. ‘This is a nightmare.’

‘I won’t get pregnant! I’m one-hundred per cent sure about that! I know my body. You don’t have to look as though...as though the sky has fallen in!’

Yes, he was a nomad. Yes, he had just jacked in his job to embark on a precarious and unpredictable career. But did he have to look so damned appalled? And then, hard on the heels of that thought, came wrenching dismay at the insanity of thinking that a pregnancy wouldn’t be the end of the world. God, what was she thinking? Had she gone completely mad?

She snatched the various bits and pieces left on the kitchen table and began slamming them into cupboards.

‘God knows, you’re probably right,’ he gritted, catching her by the arm and pulling her round to face him. ‘But I’ve had sufficient experience of the fairer sex to know that they—’

‘What experience? What are you talking about?’

Leo paused. Money bred suspicion and he had always been suspicious enough to know that it was a mistake to trust contraception to the opposite sex.

Except, how could he say that when he was supposed to be a struggling writer existing on the remnants of his savings from whatever two-bit job he had been in? How could he confess that five years previously he had had a scare with a woman in the dying stages of their relationship. The Pill she claimed to have been on, which she then later denied... Two weeks of hell cursing himself for having been a trusting idiot and, in the end, thankfully there had been no pregnancy. There was nothing he could have done in the circumstances, but a split condom was still bad news.

But how could he concede that his vast financial reserves made him a natural target for potential gold-diggers?

‘You must really think that you’re such a desirable catch that women just can’t help wanting to tie you down by falling pregnant!’

‘So you’re telling me that I’m not a desirable catch?’ Crisis over. Deception, even as an acceptable means to an end, was proving unsavoury. He smiled a sexy half-smile, clearing his head of any shade of guilt, telling himself that a chance in a million did not constitute anything to get worked up about.

‘There are better options...’ The tension slowly seeped out of her although she was tempted to pry further, to find out who these determined women were—the ones he had bedded, the ones who had wanted more.

She tried to picture him in his other life, sitting in a cubicle behind a desk somewhere with a computer in front of him. She couldn’t. He seemed so at home in casual clothes; dealing with the snow; making sure the fireplace was well supplied with logs; doing little handyman jobs around the place, the sort she usually ended up having to pay someone to do for her. He now had a stubbly six o’clock shadow on his jawline because he told her that he saw no point in shaving twice a day. He was a man made for the great outdoor life. And yet...

‘You were going to tell me about Bridget,’ Leo said casually, moving to sit at the table and shoving his chair out so that he could stretch his legs in front of him. ‘Before you rudely decided to interrupt the conversation by demanding sex.’

Brianna laughed. Just like that, whatever mood had swept over her like an ugly, freak wave looming unexpectedly from calm waters dissolved and disappeared.

‘As I said, you’ll like her.’ She began unloading the dishwasher, her mind only half-focused on what she was saying; she was looking ahead to the technicalities of keeping the pub shut, wondering how long she could afford the luxury, trying to figure out whether her battered four-wheel drive could make it to the village so that she could stock up on food...

Leo’s lips twisted with disdain. ‘Funnily enough, whenever someone has said that to me in the past I’m guaranteed to dislike the person in question.’ For the first time, he thought of his birth mother in a way that wasn’t exclusively abstract, wasn’t merely a jigsaw piece that had to be located and slotted in for the completed picture.

What did she look like? Tall, short, fat, thin...? And from whom had he inherited his non-Irish looks? His adoptive parents had both been small, neat and fair-haired. He had towered above them, dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned...as physically different from them as chalk from cheese.

He stamped down his surge of curiosity and reminded himself that he wasn’t here to form any kind of relationship with the woman but merely finally to lay an uncertain past to rest. Anger, curiosity and confusion were unhappy life companions and the faster he dispensed with them, the better.

‘You’re very suspicious, Leo.’ Brianna thought back to his vehement declaration that women couldn’t be trusted when it came to contraception. ‘Everyone loves Bridget.’

‘You mentioned that she didn’t have a...partner.’ A passing remark on which Brianna had not elaborated. Now, Leo was determined to prise as much information out of her as he could, information that would be a useful backdrop for when he met the woman the following day. It was a given, he recognised, that some people might think him heartless to extract information from the woman he was sleeping with, but he decided to view that as a necessity—something that couldn’t be helped, something to be completely disassociated from the fact that they were lovers, and extremely passionate lovers at that.

Life, generally speaking, was all about people using people. If he hadn’t learned that directly from his adoptive parents, then he certainly must have had it cemented somewhere deep within his consciousness. Perhaps, and in spite of his remarkably stable background, the fact that he was adopted had allowed a seed of cynicism to run rampant over the years.

‘She doesn’t talk much about that.’

‘No? Why not? You’re her...what would you say...confidante? I would have thought that she would find it a comfort to talk to you about whatever happened. I mean, you’ve known each other how long? Were your parents friends with the woman?’

Brianna laughed. ‘Oh, gosh, no!’ She glanced round the kitchen, making sure that all her jobs were done. ‘Bridget is a relative newcomer to this area.’

‘Really...’ Leo murmured. ‘I was under the impression that she was a valued, long-standing member of the community.’ He almost laughed at the thought of that. Valued member of the community? Whilst jettisoning an unwanted child like an item of disposable garbage? Only in a community of jailbirds would someone like that have been up for consideration as a valued member.

‘But now you tell me that she’s a newcomer. How long has she been living in the area?’

‘Eight years tops.’

‘And before that?’

Brianna shot him a look of mild curiosity but, when he smiled that smile at her, that crooked, sexy half-smile, she felt any niggling questions hovering on the tip of her tongue disappear.

‘You’re asking a lot of questions,’ she murmured breathlessly. He signalled for her to come closer and she did, until he could wrap his arms around her and hold her close.

‘Like I said, I have a curious mind.’ He breathed in the clean floral scent of her hair and for a few seconds forgot everything. ‘You shouldn’t have put your jumper back on,’ he remarked in a voice that thrilled her to the core. ‘I like looking at your breasts. Just the perfect mouthful...’

‘And I have calls to make if I’m to keep the pub shut!’ She slapped away his wandering hand, even though she would have liked nothing more than to drag him up to the bedroom to lay claim to him. ‘And you have a book to work on!’

‘I’d rather work on you...’

‘Thank goodness Bridget isn’t here. She’d be horrified.’

Leo nearly burst out laughing. ‘And is this because she’s the soul of prurience? You still haven’t told me where she came from. Maybe she was a nun in her former life?’ He began strolling out of the kitchen towards the sitting room with the open fire which he had requisitioned as his working space. His computer was shut and there was a stack of novels by the side of it, books he had picked from her collection. He had already started two, abandoned them both and was reaching the conclusion that soul-searching novels with complicated themes were not for him.

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’ Brianna hovered by the table as he sat down. She knew that he demanded complete privacy when he was writing, sectioning off a corner of the sitting area, his back to the window. Yet somehow it felt as though their conversation was not quite at an end, even though he wasn’t asking any further questions.

‘Was I?’

His cool, dark eyes rested on her and she flushed and traced an invisible pattern with her finger on the table. Was there something she was missing? Some important link she was failing to connect?

‘You’ve known this woman for a few years...’

‘Nearly seven. She came to the pub one evening on her own.’

‘In other words, she has a drinking habit?’

‘No! She’d moved to the area and she thought it might be a way of meeting people! We have quiz nights here once a month. She used to come for the quiz nights, and after a while we got chatting.’

‘Chatting about where she had come from? Oh no; of course, you know nothing about that. And I’m guessing not many clues as to what she was doing here either? It’s a small place for a woman who wants to meet people...’

‘It’s a community. We make outsiders feel welcome.’ She blushed at her unwitting choice of words. ‘I felt sorry for her,’ Brianna continued hurriedly. ‘I started an over-forties’ quiz night, ladies only, so that she could get talking to some of them.’

Leo was mentally joining the dots and was arriving at a picture not dissimilar to the one he had always had of the woman who had given birth to him—with a few extra trimmings thrown in for good measure.

A new life and a new start for someone with a dubious past to conceal. Tellingly, no one knew about this past life, including the girl who had supposedly become her anchor in the community.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that, where there were secrets that required concealment, those secrets were dirty little ones. He had received half a picture from Brianna, he was certain of it—the rosy half, the half that didn’t conform to his expectations.

‘And you did all this without having a clue as to this woman’s past?’

‘I don’t need to know every single detail about someone’s past to recognise a good person when I see one!’ She folded her arms tightly around her and glared down at him. She should have let him carry on with his writing. Instead, she had somehow found herself embroiled in an argument she hadn’t courted and was dismayed at how sick it made her feel. ‘I don’t want to argue with you about this, Leo.’

‘You’re young. You’re generous and trusting. You’re about to give house room to someone whose past is a mystery.’ He drew an uneasy parallel with his own circumstance, here at the pub under a very dubious cloud of deceit indeed, and dismissed any similarities. He was, after all, as upstanding and law-abiding as they came. No shady past here.

On the very point of tipping over into anger that he was in the process of dismissing her as the sort of gullible fool who might be taken in by someone who was up to no good, another thought lodged in the back of her mind. It took up residence next to the pernicious feel-good seed that had been planted when she had considered the possibility that he might not be welcoming Bridget because he cherished their one-to-one solitude.

Was he seriously worried about her? And if he was... That thought joined the other links in the chain that seemed to represent the nebulous beginnings of a commitment...

She knew that she was treading on very dangerous ground even having these crazy day dreams but she couldn’t push them away. With her heart beating like a jack hammer, she attempted to squash the thrilling notion that he was concerned about her welfare.

‘Do you think that my friend might be a homicidal maniac in the guise of a friendly and rather lonely woman?’

Leo frowned darkly. Brianna’s thoughts about Bridget were frankly none of his concern, and irrelevant to the matter in hand, but he couldn’t contain a surge of sudden, disorienting protectiveness.

Brianna had had to put her dreams and ambitions on hold to take charge of her father’s failing business, whilst at the same time trying to deal with the double heartbreak of her father’s death and her lover’s abandonment. It should have been enough to turn her into an embittered shrew. Yet there was a transparent openness and natural honesty about her that had surfaced through the challenging debris of her past. She laughed a lot, she seldom complained and she was the sort of girl who would never spare an act of kindness.

‘When people remove themselves for no apparent reason to start a new beginning, it’s usually because they’re running away from something.’

‘You mean the police?’

Leo shrugged and tugged her towards him so that she collapsed on his lap with a stifled laugh. ‘What if she turns into an unwanted pub guest who overstays her welcome?’ He angled her so that she was straddling him on his lap and delicately pushed up the jumper.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Brianna contradicted him breathlessly. ‘You should get down to your writing. I should continue with my stock taking...’

In response to that, Leo eased the jumper off and gazed at her small, pert breasts with rampant satisfaction. He began licking one of her nipples, a lazy, light, teasing with the tip of his tongue, a connoisseur sampling an exquisite and irresistible offering.

‘She has a perfectly nice little house of her own.’ There was something wonderfully decadent about doing this, sitting on his lap in the middle of the empty pub, watching him as he nuzzled her breast as if he had all the time in the world and was in no hurry to take things to the next level.

‘But—’ Leo broke off. ‘Here...’ he flicked his tongue against her other nipple ‘...she would have...’ he suckled for a few seconds, drawing her breast into his mouth ‘...you...’ a few kisses on the soft roundness until he could feel her shiver and shudder ‘...to take care of her; cook her food...’

He held one of her breasts in his hand so that it was pushed up to him, the nipple engorged and throbbing, and he delicately sucked it. ‘Brianna, she might seem perfectly harmless to you.’ With a sigh, he leaned back in the chair and gave her tingling breasts a momentary reprieve. ‘But what do you do if she decides that a cosy room in a pub, surrounded by people and hands-on waitress service, is more appealing than an empty house and the exertion of having to cook her own food?’

At no point was he inclined to give the woman the benefit of the doubt. In his experience, people rarely deserved that luxury, and certainly not someone with her particular shady history.

Never one ever to have been possessive or protective about the women in his life, he was a little shaken by the fierce streak suddenly racing through him that was repelled by the thought of someone taking advantage of the girl sitting on his lap with the easy smile, the flushed face and tousled hair.

‘You need to exercise caution,’ he muttered grimly. He raked his fingers through his hair and scowled, as though she had decided to disagree with him even though she hadn’t uttered a word.

‘Then maybe,’ Brianna teased him lightly, ‘you should stick around and make sure I don’t end up becoming a patsy...’

The journey here should have taken no time at all; his stay should have been over in a matter of a couple of days. There were meetings waiting for him and urgent trips abroad that could only be deferred for so long. It had never been his intention to turn this simple fact-finding exercise into a drama in three parts.

‘Maybe I should,’ he heard himself say softly. ‘For a while...’

‘And you can chase her away if she turns out to be an unscrupulous squatter who wants to take advantage of me.’ She laughed as though nothing could be more ridiculous and raised her hand to caress his cheek.

Leo circled her slim wrist with his fingers in a vice-like grip. ‘Oh, if she tries that,’ he said in a voice that made her shiver, ‘she’ll discover just what a ruthless opponent I could prove to be—and just how regrettable it can be to cross my path.’