by Leo’s controlling behaviour.
‘I know and I can’t wait to sign on that official dotted line,’ Leo grated impatiently. ‘Then I’ll know where you are and how you are.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Grace breathed in a daze. ‘We can’t just get married. You were engaged to Marina!’
‘Marina’s the past, you’re the present,’ Leo cut in with ruthless bite. ‘And at this moment I’m only interested in the future and it starts here, now with your answer...’
Grace pinned tremulous lips together in the terrible stretching silence. Her heart seemed to be hammering in her eardrums. He was threatening her aunt and uncle’s comfortable life and she couldn’t just stand by and do nothing after all they had done for her, she thought wretchedly. They had brought her up, supported her at school, kept her safe. All right, it had been far from perfect but they were still the only family she had and she didn’t want them to suffer in any way by association with her. Leo held all the cards: her uncle’s employment, Della’s legal firm’s dependency on the business Leo sent their way. Della had worked long and hard for a partnership and if she had been rude to Leo—well, she was pretty rude to a lot of people, never having been the type to tolerate fools. Grace’s mind and her thoughts were in turmoil.
‘You could explain now about Marina,’ she proffered tersely.
‘No, that ship’s already sailed,’ Leo slammed back at her coolly. ‘Are you marrying me on Friday or not?’
Grace wanted to say not, to puncture his carapace of arrogant strength and challenge him, but her character was grounded very firmly in compassion and the risk of her relatives having to pay a high price for her mistake in getting pregnant by the wrong man was not one she could ignore. She snatched in a wavering breath and damned him with her pale green defiant gaze. ‘I’ll give you an answer in the morning.’
‘Why drag this out?’
‘Because it’s a very big decision,’ Grace countered quietly. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve decided tomorrow.’
Impatience assailed Leo and he gritted his strong white teeth. Her eyes were luminous pools of pale green but he noticed the dark circles etched below them and her general pallor. ‘You look very tired.’
Grace coloured in receipt of that unflattering comment. ‘I’m going back downstairs to go straight to bed.’
‘Have you eaten?’ he shot at her as she reached the door.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I’ll meet you here for breakfast at eight in the morning,’ Leo decreed.
How could she marry a man who had been planning to marry another woman for three long years? How could she surrender to blackmail? Would Leo really damage her aunt’s and uncle’s livelihoods and careers? Or was he bluffing? And if bluffing was a possibility was she prepared to light the fuse and wait and see what actually happened if she said no?
Grace lay in bed mulling over those weighty questions. Although she had completely dismissed the idea, Leo had mentioned marriage the very first day he’d discovered she was pregnant, she recalled ruefully. It seemed that marrying the mother of his child was important to him, so important he had immediately recognised it as a necessity. Not that that excused him in any way for employing threats when persuasion had failed, she reasoned.
Grace had so many unanswered questions that she was now wishing that she had listened to what Leo had had to say for himself earlier that day at his apartment. Clearly, Leo’s relationship with Marina was unusual. When Marina had introduced herself to Grace, she had been fairly polite and remarkably composed for a female whose fiancé had just dumped her for another woman. Even so, Marina had repeatedly said that Grace having Leo’s child would wreck all their lives. It was possible that Marina was simply a good actress but even that didn’t explain the peculiarity of Marina visiting Grace to try and buy her off and then freely admitting that embarrassing fact to Leo.
Her head beginning to pound with the strain of her anxious reflections, Grace acknowledged that had Marina not existed she would’ve agreed to marry Leo. After all, it was best to be honest with herself: she did want Leo in spite of the shocks he had dealt her. It wasn’t sensible, it wasn’t justifiable but she had pretty much been infatuated with Leo from the moment she’d met him. On those grounds and bearing in mind the reality that she would very much like her baby to grow up with a father, shouldn’t she give marriage a chance?
Only, how did she marry a male willing to blackmail her into agreement? That was wrong, that was so wrong. And the best of it was, she was convinced that Leo knew it was wrong but he had still put that pressure on her in an effort to get what he wanted. She did owe a debt of care to her uncle and aunt and if their lives were blighted because of something she had done she would be gutted, which didn’t give her much in the way of choice. On the other hand, Grace reflected as she swallowed another yawn, she could agree to marriage with certain provisos attached.
* * *
Leo studied Grace as she joined him for breakfast, her face blank, her eyes uninformative. He reckoned she would make a good poker player and the challenge of that talent in a potential wife amused him. ‘Well?’ he prompted grimly, still annoyed that she had forced him to wait for her answer.
Grace sipped at her tea, wishing that Leo didn’t look quite so amazing first thing in the morning when she felt washed out and weary. There he was with his dark golden eyes alive with potent leaping energy, his blue-black hair still damp from the shower and his hard jawline close shaven. He wore yet another one of those remarkably well-tailored suits that beautifully defined his lean, muscular build. ‘I’ll say yes because you really haven’t given me a choice.’
‘Choice is a very much overrated gift,’ Leo declared, pouring himself a cup of fragrant coffee with a steady hand, determined not to react in any way to her capitulation. ‘People don’t always make the right choice. Sometimes they need a little push in the relevant direction.’
‘This was more than a little push,’ Grace censured. ‘I don’t know why you’re doing it either. You can’t want me as a wife that much.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m just ordinary.’
‘I don’t see you that way, meli mou,’ Leo countered. ‘I see you as different, as special.’
‘Leo, you just blackmailed me into marrying you. Ditch the flattery!’ Grace said very drily. ‘And I may be saying yes but there would have to be certain conditions attached.’
Leo tensed again and flung back his arrogant head, shapely mouth flattening back into a tough line. ‘Such as?’
‘As the term hasn’t started yet, I’m considering taking a year out while all this is going on but I would want to return to my studies in London next year. You would have to support that.’
‘Naturally I would support that arrangement,’ Leo asserted, the tension locking his lean bronzed features into tautness evaporating.
Grace went pink and gathered her strength. ‘And it would have to be a platonic marriage.’
Leo went rigid again and studied her with incredulous dark eyes as if she were insane. ‘You can’t
