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‘I hear you came first in the hundred-metre sprint,’ Leo said, trying to bring the tension down a notch or two. ‘Well done!’
He looked at Heather, and as their eyes tangled she felt a wave of sympathy for the man. Of course, he didn’t deserve her sympathy. From all accounts, he threw money at his son but rarely gave him the time that was so essential. But, her naturally warm nature reluctantly seeing the situation from both points of view, how hard it must be, she thought, for him to incorporate a young child into his life? Up until eight months ago, he had been completely unaware of his son’s existence, and had been accustomed to doing everything his own way, with no need to consider the welfare of another human being.
‘He’s a star,’ she interjected into the silence, moving forward and pulling Daniel towards her in a natural embrace. She wondered how his father couldn’t be charmed by his gorgeous, dark-haired seven-year-old son with those big brown eyes and skinny, vulnerable legs sticking out from his school shorts, which he had yet to change out of. ‘Aren’t you, Dan?’ She ruffled his hair affectionately and then said brightly, ‘You have a wonderful weekend, and don’t forget you can pop over any time if you want help with your English homework!’
Relegated to the sidelines, Leo saw that rarest of things, a shy smile of warmth and affection from his son. Naturally not directed at him, but a smile nevertheless. He looked at his watch and said briskly, ‘I think we should be heading back to the house now, Daniel; leave Heather to get on with…whatever she has to get on with.’
‘Can’t you come across on the weekend?’ Daniel suddenly turned to Heather with a pleading look, which of course immediately made Leo frown impatiently. Was his own company so dire that his son needed rescuing from any possibility of prolonged, unwanted bonding at all costs? Leo was uncomfortably reminded of Heather’s little talk, the first little talk he had had on the subject of his son since he had met him on that plane at Heathrow all those months ago.
‘We could go see that Disney movie,’ Daniel was now saying with a touch of desperation in his voice. ‘You know, you told me that you wanted to see it but you would have to rent a child to take along…’
‘I’m sorry, Daniel. I’ve got heaps of things to do, and I was just teasing when I said that I wanted to see that movie. I don’t actually like Disney movies.’
‘You’ve got lots of them in that cabinet in your sitting room,’ Daniel was quick to point out, with the unerring talent of a child to say precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Heather reddened, cleared her throat, could think of nothing to say, reddened a bit more and eventually broke the expectant silence. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Of course, she had no intention of going to a movie with them, or going anywhere else for that matter.
She had spoken her mind, for better or for worse, and had met with a resounding lack of success. Leo West was egotistical, driven to the point of obsession and would never take advice from anyone, least of all from a woman like her. Hadn’t he assumed that she busied herself meddling in other people’s lives because she had no life of her own?
She had a life. A very good one!
In the stillness of the cottage, which seemed unnaturally quiet when her warring visitors had disappeared, she considered the excellent life she had.
Wonderful job, doing the one thing she couldn’t have been happier doing, illustrating children’s books, getting inspiration from her garden which she translated into pictures that were slowly achieving notoriety as works of art in themselves. She worked from home, travelling into London once a month so that she could go through her graphics with her art editor. It was a real luxury.
She also owned her cottage outright. No mortgage; no debt owing, in fact, to anyone. Which made her as free as a bird.
True, there was no man in her life, but that, she told herself, was exactly how she wanted it.
Little snippets of her past intruded into her peaceful cottage: Brian, as she had first known him when she had still been a young girl of eighteen and he had been on the brink of his glittering career. Blonde hair, straight, thick and always falling across his face, until he had had it cut because, he had told her seriously, in his profession men all wore their hair short.
Heather blinked and shoved that little nest of bitter memories back into their Pandora’s box. She had learnt years ago that dwelling on things that couldn’t be changed was a waste of time.
Instead, she shifted her attention to the kitchen which still bore the remnants of Daniel’s hastily eaten meal of spaghetti Bolognese. His father, he had told her, had planned on taking them out to dinner but he hadn’t wanted to go. He hated those fancy restaurants they went to. He hated the food. As a postscript, he had added that he hated his father.
Which made her start thinking of Leo and, once she started, she found that she couldn’t seem to stop. That cold, ruthless face swam into her head until she was forced to retreat to her little office and try and lose herself in the illustration she was currently working on. She was peering at the detail of a fairy wing, every pore in her being focused on the minute detail of painting, when the bang on her front door sent her jerking back, knocking over the jar of water, which shattered into a thousand pieces on the wooden floor.
A second bang, more demanding this time, had her running to the front door before she had time to clean up the slowly spreading mess on the ground.
She pulled open the door before a third bang brought down the roof.
‘You! What are you doing here?’ He was no longer in his suit. Instead, he was wearing a pair of cream trousers and a navy-blue polo shirt. Behind him was a gleaming silver Bentley.
At nearly nine in the evening, the sun had faded to a dull, mellow, grey light.
Leo dealt Heather a grim nod. ‘Believe me, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be here, but I have been put in the difficult position of having to ask you to accompany us to the cinema tomorrow. Daniel has dug his heels in and refused to budge. I’m being blackmailed by someone who hasn’t even graduated to books without pictures. It’s ridiculous, but it’s true, hence the reason I’m here when I should be reading over a due-diligence report that can’t wait.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Why don’t you let me in and I can explain?’
‘I’m sorry, but can’t this wait until tomorrow? It’s late, and I have stuff to do.’
‘Late?’ Leo made a show of consulting his watch. ‘It’s ten past nine. On a Friday night. Since when is that late?’
Heather heard the amused incredulity in his voice and felt her hackles rise.
‘I was working,’ she said stiffly.
‘Of course. You never got around to telling me exactly what you do for a living.’
‘You aren’t interested in what I do for a living.’
Leo thought that she was spot on with that, but circumstances had forced his hand. He had returned to the house with Daniel in frozen silence and had endured what could only be called silent warfare.
The mobile phone had been looked at and then refused, on the grounds of, ‘Thank you very much, but the teacher doesn’t allow mobile phones at school.’
And, ‘It’s a kind thought, but young children don’t need mobile telephones,’ from his mother.
Frustration had almost driven him to ask his mother what the hell was going on because surely, surely, this complete lack of co operation couldn’t just be caused by the fact that he had missed a Sports Day! But Katherine had taken herself off to bed at a ridiculously early hour, and so here he was, compelled to try and do a patch-up job with the amateur psychologist in the hope that the weekend might not end up a complete write-off.
‘You seem to have something on your face…’ He rubbed his finger along the blue streak adorning her chin and gazed in bemusement at his finger. ‘What is it? Paint? Is that how you spend your Friday evenings—painting your house?’
Heather pushed the door, but Leo wasn’t having any of that. He wedged his foot neatly into the open space and met her hostile stare with a grimly determined expression.
‘You can’t just come here and disturb me at this hour,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘Needs must. Now, are you going to let me in?’ He stood back and raked his hands impatiently through his hair. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said heavily, ‘that I was the only father who didn’t make it to the Sports Day.’ It was a concession of sorts and as close to an olive branch that Leo was going to offer.
Situation defused.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘No, I’m not. Every single parent was there, taking pictures. Daniel had asked me to come along to watch, pretended that he didn’t care whether you came or not, but I watched him, and he kept looking around for you, wondering if you were somewhere in the crowd.’
‘Are you going to let me in?’ Leo asked brusquely, not liking this image of himself as some kind of heartless monster.
Heather reluctantly opened the door and allowed him to stride past her. She hadn’t noticed earlier, but he dominated the space—not just because he was tall, but because of that aura he exuded, an aura of supreme power. He owned the air around him in a way that Brian never had, even though it had seemed so at the time. She shivered.
‘So, where were you painting?’ Leo asked, looking around him. He had quizzed his mother about Heather, ignoring her look of surprise at his interest, and had gleaned that she and Daniel trotted over to the cottage whenever they had a chance. Heather had, it would seem, become quite a fixture in the household. Little wonder that she had been polishing her soapbox in anticipation of his arrival.
He followed her into a room at the back of the house, and was confronted by walls on which hung every manner of artwork. Yet more were housed in an antique architect’s chest against the wall.
‘I broke my glass,’ Heather said, kneeling down so that she could begin carefully picking up the shards. ‘When you banged on the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone.’
‘You…paint?’
Heather looked briefly at him and blushed, suddenly feeling vulnerable as those flint-grey eyes roved over the artwork on her walls. ‘I told you that I had a job,’ she said, before resuming her glass-collecting task. It would take a heck of a lot more elbow grease to fully clean the ground, but the biggest bits had been collected; the elbow grease would have to wait until the morning, because right now she was finding it hard to think properly. She just wanted him out of her cottage so that she could get her scattered wits back into order.
Leo dragged his eyes away from the paintings and focused entirely on the woman standing in front of him. When she had told him that she had a job, he had assumed something along the lines of a secretary, maybe a receptionist somewhere, perhaps. But she was an artist, and it explained a lot. Her apparent lack of any recognisable fashion sense, her woolly-headed assumption that she could say whatever she wanted to say without thinking, her earnest belief that she could somehow solve a situation over a cup of tea and a good chat. Artists occupied a different world to most normal people. It was common knowledge they lived in a world of their own.
He refocused on the matter at hand. ‘I don’t know how you’ve managed to form such a strong bond with my son,’ he said, not beating about the bush. ‘But after the Sports Day…situation…it seems that the only way this weekend isn’t going to descend into a nightmare is if you…’ Leo searched around to find the right words. It wasn’t in his nature to ask favours of anyone, and having to do so now left a sour taste in his mouth. He especially didn’t like asking favours from a woman who got on his nerves. Moreover, he would have to be pleasant towards her.
Leo had tried his damnedest to form a bond with his son, but there was murky water under the bridge, and he had had time to reflect that it wasn’t Daniel’s fault. Without a great deal of difficulty, he could see any relationship he might have with his son sink without trace beneath a tide of remembered bitterness.
‘If I…what?’
‘Movies…lunch…dinner. I leave on Sunday afternoon,’ he felt compelled to tack on because he could see the dawning dismay spreading across her face.
‘You mean you want me to sacrifice my entire weekend to bail you out of a situation you can’t handle?’
‘Sacrifice?’ Leo laughed drily. ‘I don’t think there’s a woman alive who has ever seen a weekend spent in my company as a sacrifice.’
‘That’s the problem,’ Heather said. ‘Men like you never do.’
CHAPTER TWO
LEO decided to leave that half-muttered remark alone. Why get embroiled in a lengthy question-and-answer session with a woman who was an irrelevance in his life? On a more practical note, he needed her for the weekend, because he couldn’t face a day and a half of his son’s withdrawn sadness. If she could smooth things over, then far be it from him to invite further hostility from her. As far as he was concerned, though, all this interest in a kid who happened to live a couple of fields away from her spoke of an unhealthy lack of social life, but each to their own.
By lunchtime the following day—having spent the morning at the zoo, where his son had displayed an amazing knowledge of animals, rattling off facts to Heather and his mother while studiously ignoring him—Leo was beginning to feel his curiosity piqued.
She exuded warmth, and when she laughed, which she seemed to do often, it was a rich, infectious laughter.
Of course the laughter, like his son’s encyclopaediac knowledge of every animal, was not directed at him.
Over a cup of tea in the canteen at the zoo—which Leo could only describe as a marginally more savoury experience than if he had actually pulled his chair into one of the animal enclosures—he noticed that the woman was not strictly limited to conversations about dinosaurs, reptiles and computer games. When his mother asked him about work, in an attempt to include him in the conversation, Leo was taken aback to be quizzed about the politics of mergers and acquisitions in so far as they affected the lives of countless hapless victims of ‘marauding conglomerates’.
While his mother tried to hide her amusement, Leo stared at Heather as though she had mutated into one of the animals they had just been feeding.
Marauding conglomerates? Since when did country bumpkins use expressions like that?
He also didn’t like the way her mouth curled with scorn when she addressed him, but in front of his mother and Daniel there was nothing he could do but smile coldly at her and change the subject.
Now, with the animals out of the way, he was taking them all to lunch; that nasty little remark she had flung at him the evening before, the remark which he had generously chosen to overlook, was beginning to prey on his mind.
Just who the hell did the woman think she was? Did she imagine that because she was doing him a favour she could indulge in whatever cheap shot she wanted at his expense?
People rarely got under Leo’s skin. This particularly applied to women. He was astute when it came to reading their feminine wiles, and could see through any minor sulk to exactly what lay underneath. In short, they were a predictable entity.
As they headed for the Italian on the main street, he stuck his hands in his pockets and murmured, bending so that his words were for her ears only,
‘Artist and financial expert, hmm? A woman of many talents. I had no idea you had such a keen interest in the business world.’
Heather pulled back. Something about his warm breath against her face had made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle.
It had been a mistake to let him rattle her, and she had been unable to resist wiping that lazy, condescending expression off his face by parrying with him about finance. Against her will, she had once known those money markets until they were coming out of her ears—and, once learnt, always remembered. It had been worth it just to see the shocked look on his face when she’d thrown in a few technical terms that surely a country hick like her should never have known.
Now, with his gleaming eyes fixed on her, Heather was belatedly realising that she might have been better off keeping her mouth shut and letting him get on with thinking whatever he wanted to think of her.
‘I read the newspapers,’ she muttered stiffly.
‘You’d have to be a very avid reader of the Financial Times to know as much as you do about the global trading-market. So what’s going on here?’
‘Nothing’s going on, and can I just remind you that I don’t actually have to be here? I only agreed to come because I knew that Daniel would have been disappointed if I hadn’t—and he’s already had enough disappointment with you missing his Sports Day because of “unavoidable work commitments”.’
‘It’s not going to work, so you can forget it.’
‘What’s not going to work?’
‘Your attempt to change the subject. Who the hell are you really? That’s the question I can’t stop asking myself.’
Ahead of them, Daniel and Katherine were putting a bit of distance between them; when Katherine turned round and gesticulated that she and Daniel were going to pop into his favourite sports shop, Heather could have groaned with despair.
Leo was intrigued by her reaction to his remark. From not really caring one way or another who she was, he now seriously began to wonder about her provenance.
‘Are you always so suspicious?’
‘Comes with the territory.’
‘And what territory would that be? No, don’t bother answering that—I already know.’
‘Care to explain?’
‘No, not really. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go and see what Katherine and Daniel are up to in there.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they won’t mind if we go ahead to the restaurant and wait there for them. It’s a beautiful day. Why rush?’
‘Because I have things to do at the house.’
‘What things?’
‘None of your business!’
‘I’m getting the impression that you don’t like me very much. Would I be right in that assumption?’ He went into the sports shop to tell his mother that he would wait for them at the restaurant with Heather. No rush; take as long as they wanted. ‘But don’t buy anything.’ He looked at his son, who stared back at him with grudging curiosity. ‘I want to see whatever you buy—an athlete like you needs the best equipment.’ He was rewarded with something approaching a smile.
The sports shop was an Aladdin’s den. Leo reckoned his son could spend a satisfyingly long time browsing with his mother and that, he decided, would give him sufficient time to put his sudden curiosity to bed.
He had no doubt that she would be waiting for him outside. If there was one thing Leo knew with absolute certainty, it was that no one ever walked out on him until he was finished with them.
Sure enough, there she was, peering through the window of the shoe shop, and he took a little time to look at her. The strange gypsy-skirt of the night before had been replaced by something equally shapeless, but it was a hot day and her tee shirt outlined the contours of breasts that would be more than a handful. What would they look like? What would she feel like?
That sudden thought seemed to spring from nowhere and Leo shoved it aside, disconcerted.
The woman was most definitely not his type. After his short-lived and disastrous marriage to Sophia, he had exorcised pretty little airheads from his repertoire of beddable women, and he hadn’t looked back.
