LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘It’s only awkward,’ Leandro drawled, ‘if you insist on dragging the past in. Personally, I’m the sort of guy who is happy to let bygones be bygones.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not interested in talking about why you did what you did.’

      ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Abigail muttered in a driven undertone. ‘Okay, so I didn’t tell you about my background because I didn’t want to put you off. Why is that so hard for you to understand? I’m human. You were everything I wasn’t and I couldn’t believe that you’d even looked in my direction. I didn’t want to spoil the moment and then...things started getting serious and I just never seemed to know when to sit you down and explain that you might have got the wrong idea of who I was...’

      Leandro flushed darkly. ‘Things got serious for you,’ he corrected coolly.

      Abigail nodded. ‘I won’t sit here and pretend that they didn’t,’ she told him. ‘I felt things for you and, the more I felt for you, the harder it seemed to start telling you about myself and my foster homes and what it was like growing up in them.’

      Her voice had sunk to a whisper and Leandro grimly fought off any inclination to feel sympathy for her. She deserved none, and too right he would have seen things slightly differently had he known just how desperate for money she had been. The only thing she hadn’t lied about had been her lack of sexual experience, and he’d wondered afterwards whether she’d been saving herself for the right billionaire to come along and elevate her to the status she felt she deserved. She’d certainly taken to the high life like a duck to water.

      ‘And what a stroke of bad luck,’ Leandro murmured smoothly, ‘to have ended up trying to get a job in one of the hotels I owned. The second Cecilia knew where we’d met, it would have been easy for her to work her way backwards and to have discovered the job you failed to secure because of the reference given by your ex-boss.’

      ‘He lied.’ Abigail had been so desperate to make him understand all those long months ago when his sister had confronted him in his apartment, but now she just felt tired of finding herself repeating the same old stuff all over again. It wasn’t as though he was going to listen now any more than he had then. In fact, if anything, she repulsed him more now than she would have then because, back then, they at least had been lovers and that would have counted for something, surely?

      ‘Of course,’ Leandro said soothingly. ‘Although I wouldn’t get too moral, if I were you, considering you weren’t far behind in the lying stakes...’

      Abigail looked away.

      ‘And then there was a certain incident I unearthed about a spate of shoplifting for which you received a warning in the heady days of your misspent youth...’

      Abigail’s eyes flew to his and she blanched, because this was news to her. ‘What? You had me checked out after we broke up?’

      ‘Call it curiosity.’ Because a part of him had wanted to believe her. He couldn’t credit himself for being the fool he’d been, but then he’d never felt for any other woman what he’d ended up feeling for her. The memory of that vulnerability made his teeth clench together in frustration and anger.

      ‘I remember that incident,’ Abigail said softly. Her eyes clouded over. ‘I was only twelve at the time and I was so desperate to fit in. I’d just been transferred to another foster home and...’ she sighed ‘... I just knew that the girls there weren’t going to accept me.’

      Because of how she looked. It had always been about how she looked. Her face had attracted too much attention and, in her circumstances, attracting too much attention had never been a good thing.

      ‘A group of us had gone into the shopping centre for the morning. I’d tagged along, happy as anything that I’d been invited to be part of the crowd. When we got there, I only realised that the reason I’d been asked along had been so that they could make fun of me. They dared me to steal some cheap costume jewellery from one of the shops. They didn’t think I would, which was probably why I did.’

      She glanced up at him ruefully. ‘I made a hopeless shoplifter. I couldn’t have been more obvious. Of course, I was caught as soon as I walked out, and hauled down to the police station and treated like a common criminal. It wasn’t even as though it made a spot of difference, because when I was returned to the home I still ended up standing out and being ostracised. But I learned my lesson, so that’s just one reason why I would never have stolen anything again.’

      Leandro found that he didn’t like thinking of her as a kid in a police station, probably confused and scared. In fact, he found himself wishing that he could find whatever policeman had taken her in and beat the living daylights out of him, which was such a crazy reaction that he almost wanted to laugh.

      It struck him, in a moment of blinding clarity, that the two of them might have come from wildly different backgrounds but that they had more in common than either of them might think.

      Frowning at the sudden bout of introspection, Leandro relaxed back in the chair, topped up his wine glass and looked at her with brooding intensity. ‘Like I said, there’s nothing to be gained from trips down memory lane. Tell me what you’ve been up to since we parted company.’

      Abigail stilled. She licked her lips nervously and made a big effort not to look away, because that would have been a sure sign of a guilty conscience, and she didn’t have a guilty conscience.

      ‘I... I managed to find the job I now have.’

      She cleared her throat and looked at him as evenly as she could.

      ‘When I got back to London I was out of work, as you know, and I’d gone to a café to try and work out what to do next. I didn’t know who would employ me after that reference from my ex-boss. Who was going to believe me? Anyway, while I was having a cup of coffee Vanessa came in, and there were no free tables so she asked if she could sit at mine and, well, the rest is history, so to speak.’

      She looked at him wryly and then said with some satisfaction, ‘I told her all about my past and the stupid lies that had been told about me and she believed me. She gave me a job on a trial basis and it worked out brilliantly, as it happens. I seem to have a knack for selling stuff, including high-end jewellery. None of which,’ she couldn’t help adding, ‘I have ever been tempted to stick in my handbag and take home with me.’

      ‘And men?’ Leandro decided that it was time to push on from a topic on which he had no intention of dwelling on for too long. What was done was done.

      Abigail flushed a delicate pink.

      ‘I think it’s time for me to head upstairs now. I’m tired. I want to get a good night’s rest because I intend to leave first thing in the morning, and if the weather is still poor then Hal and I will just have to chance it.’

      She stood up and neatened her outfit, which felt inappropriate, because she was no longer here on business. Her coat was upstairs in the bedroom suite which had been allocated to her, a sumptuous space that felt nearly as big as a football field. As were her handbag and the company laptop which she had brought with her. She had no idea what Leandro had done with the ring. Maybe he would hang onto it for his future wife.

      ‘Have there been other men?’

      Abigail’s breathing hitched. He stood up and closed the distance between them. She stuck her hands behind her back because she wanted to reach out and flatten them against his broad chest and feel the hardness of muscle and sinew underneath the black jumper. She wanted to fly back in time but that was impossible.

      She thought of Sam, innocently lying in his cot back in London, and the series of decisions she had made when she had discovered that she was pregnant. Fear threatened to swamp her, fear and guilt. because, although she had been torn apart at the time, wondering whether she had made the right choice to keep the pregnancy a secret from Leandro, it had been relatively easy to live with her decision because it meant she could relegate their relationship to the past. In her head, she had kept open the option to get in touch with him at some point in the future, but she

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