Кэтти Уильямс – Deal With The Devil: Secrets of a Ruthless Tycoon / The Most Expensive Lie of All / The Magnate's Manifesto (страница 19)
Not now. His brain refused to obey the commands being issued to it. What would the woman look like? Years ago, he could have had pictures taken of her when he had set his man on her trail, but he hadn’t bothered because she had been just a missing slot in his life he had wanted to fill. He hadn’t given a damn what she looked like. Now, he had to fight the temptation to stroll over to the window and peer out to the courtyard which his room overlooked.
He stiffened when he eventually heard the sound of the ambulance pulling up and the muffled rise and fall of voices which carried up to his room.
Deliberately he tuned out and exerted every ounce of will power to rein in his exasperating, wandering mind.
* * *
At a little after five, he got a text from Brianna: a light early supper would be served at six. If he wanted to join them, then he was more than welcome. Sorry she couldn’t come up to his room but she had barely had time to draw breath since Bridget had arrived.
She had concluded her text with a smiley face. Who did that? He smiled and texted back: yes, he’d be down promptly at six.
He sat back and stared at the wall. In an hour he would meet his past. He would put that to bed and then, when that was done, he would move on, back to the life from which he had taken this brief respite.
He had an image of Brianna’s face gazing at him, of her lithe, slim body, of the way she had of humming under her breath when she was occupied doing something, and the way she looked when she was curled up on the sofa trying to make sense of her accounts.
But of course, he thought grimly, that was fine. Sure, she would be on his mind. They might not have spent a long time in each other’s company but it had been concentrated time. Plenty long enough for images of her to get stuck in his head.
But she was not part of his reality. He would check out the woman who had given birth to him, put his curiosity to bed and, yes, move on...
LEO WASN’T QUITE sure when the snow had stopped, when the furious blizzards had turned to tamer snowfall, and when that tamer snowfall had given way to a fine, steady drizzle that wiped clean the white horizon and returned it to its original, snow-free state.
He couldn’t quite believe that he was still here. Of course, he returned to London sporadically mid-week and was uncomfortably aware of his conscience every time he vaguely intimated that there were things to do with the job he had ditched: paperwork that needed sorting out; problems with his accommodation that needed seeing to; social engagements that had to be fulfilled because he should have returned to London by now.
The lie he had blithely concocted before his game plan had been derailed did not sit quite so easily now. But what the hell was he to do?
He rose to move towards the window and stared distractedly down at the open fields that backed the pub. It was nearly three. In three hours, the pub would be alive with the usual Friday evening crowd, most of whom he knew by sight if not by name.
How had something so straightforward become so tangled in grey areas?
Of course, he knew. In fact, he could track the path as clearly as if it was signposted. His simple plan—go in, confirm all the suspicions he had harboured about his birth mother, close the book and leave—had slipped out of place the second he had been confronted with Brianna.
She was everything the women he had dated in the past were not. Was that why he had not been able to kill his ill-advised temptation to take her to bed? And had her natural, open personality, once sampled, become an addiction he found impossible to jettison? He couldn’t seem to see her without wanting her. She turned him on in ways that were unimaginable. For once in his life, he experienced a complete loss of self-control when they made love; it was a drug too powerful to resist.
And then...his mother. The woman he had prejudged, had seen as no more than a distasteful curiosity that had to be boxed and filed away, had not slotted neatly into the box he had prepared.
With a sigh, he raked his fingers through his hair and glanced over his shoulder to the reports blinking at him, demanding urgent attention, yet failing to focus it.
He thought back to when he had met her, that very first impression: smaller than he’d imagined, clearly younger, although her face was worn, very frail after hospital. He had expected someone brash, someone who fitted the image of a woman willing to give away a baby. He had realised, after only an hour in her company, that his preconceived notions were simplistic. That was an eventuality he had not taken into account. He lived his life with clean lines, no room for all those grey areas that could turn stark reality into a sludgy mess. But he had heard her gentle voice and, hard as he had tried not to be swayed, he had found himself hovering on the brink of needing to know more before he made his final judgement.
Not that anything she had said had been of any importance. The three of them had sat on that first evening and had dinner while Brianna had fussed and clucked and his mother had smiled with warm sympathy and complained about her garden and the winter vegetables which would sadly be suffering from negligence.
She had asked him about himself. He had looked at her and wondered where his dark eyes and colouring came from. She was slight and blonde with green eyes. At one point, she had murmured with a faraway expression that he reminded her of someone, someone she used to know, but he had killed that tangent and moved the conversation along.
Seeing her, meeting her, had made him feel weird, confused, uncomfortable in his own skin. A thousand questions had reared their ugly heads and he had killed them all by grimly holding on to his anger. But underneath that anger he had known only too well that the foundations on which he had relied were beginning to feel shaky. He had no longer known what he should be feeling.
Since that first day, he had seen her, though, only in brief interludes and always with Brianna around. Much of the time she spent in her bedroom. She was an avid reader. He had had to reacquaint himself with literature in an attempt to keep his so-called writer occupation as credible as possible. He had caught himself wondering what books she enjoyed reading.
On his last trip to London, he had brought with him a stack of books and had been surprised to discover that, after a diet of work-related reading, the fiction and non-fiction he had begun delving into had not been the hard work he had expected. And at least he could make a halfway decent job of sounding articulate on matters non-financial.
Where this was going to lead, he had no idea.
He headed downstairs and pulled up short at the sight of Bridget sitting in the small lounge set aside from the bar area, which Brianna had turned into her private place if she didn’t want to remain in her bedroom.
Because of Bridget, the pub now had slightly restricted opening and closing hours. He assumed that that was something that could only be achieved in a small town where all the regulars knew what was going on and would not be motivated to take their trade elsewhere—something that would have been quite tedious, as ‘elsewhere’ was not exactly conveniently located to get to by foot or on a bike.
‘Leo!’
Leo paused, suddenly indecisive at being confronted by his mother without Brianna around as an intermediary. She was sitting by the large bay window that overlooked the back garden and the fields behind the pub. Her fair hair was tied back and the thin, gaunt lines of her face were accentuated so that she resembled a wraith.
‘Brianna’s still out.’ She patted the chair facing hers and motioned to him to join her. ‘We haven’t chatted very much at all. Why don’t you have a cup of tea with me?’
Leo frowned, exasperated at his inability to take control of the situation. Did he want to talk to his mother on a one-to-one basis? Why did he suddenly feel so...vulnerable and at odds with himself at the prospect? Wasn’t this why he had descended on this back-of-nowhere town in the first place? So things had not turned out quite as he had anticipated, but wasn’t it still on his agenda to find out what the woman was like?
He was struck by the unexpectedly fierce urge to find out what had possessed her to throw him to the wolves.
He thought that perhaps the facade she portrayed now was a far cry from the real person lurking underneath, and he hardened himself against the weak temptation to be swept along into thinking that she was innocent, pathetic and deserving of sympathy. Could it be that, without Brianna there to impress, her true colours would be revealed?
‘I think I’ll have black coffee myself. Would you like to switch to coffee?’
‘No, my dear, my pot of tea will be fine, although perhaps you could refresh the hot water. I feel exhausted if I’m on my feet for too long and I’ve been far too active today for my own good.’
He was back with a mug of coffee and the newly refreshed pot of tea which he rested on the table by her, next to the plate of biscuits which were untouched.