city?’ Maddie asked a little breathlessly, and Leo shrugged.
‘Perhaps not even overnight,’ he mused, harking back to his original plan and marvelling at the speed with which it had changed course along the way. Just as well as he was a man who could think on his feet and adapt.
At any rate, he’d probably seen everything there was to see with regard to the condition of the store, short of tapping on walls and peering into cupboards. He knew enough to settle the thorny matter of how much he should offer for the place and how fast he should move. He presumed the boss was ready to throw the towel in.
But that wasn’t what was putting a smile on his face at the moment.
‘It might be nice to...er...to have dinner with you.’ Maddie blushed and glanced away.
‘May I ask what’s prompted the change of heart?’ Leo asked wryly. ‘Five minutes ago I was the devil incarnate for suggesting any such thing.’
‘I...’ Maddie took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t been in Ireland long, and it would be...nice to have some company for a couple of hours. I’ve more or less stayed in on my own for the past few weeks.’
With her looks, Leo mused, solitude would have to be her chosen option—because she’d only have to step foot out of her front door and company would be available in any direction she chose to look.
But then that probably wasn’t the sort of company she had in mind. The sort of company that came with strings attached. The sort of company she had assumed he’d been offering—and, frankly, her assumptions had been dead-on.
Leo wasn’t surprised that her looks had made her wary of the attention she got—had made her guarded and cynical about what men wanted from her. It wasn’t that different from the way his vast wealth had made him guarded and cynical when it came to the opposite sex.
He wasn’t looking for commitment and he didn’t do declarations of love. He enjoyed impermanence when it came to women.
Leo didn’t know whether he might have gone down the normal route of marriage, two point two kids and a house in the country—or in his case several houses in several countries—if bitter experience hadn’t taught him the value of steering clear of relationships.
His grandparents had been very happily married. His parents, he had been told, had likewise been very happily married—indeed, had been on something of a second honeymoon when a lorry, going too fast in bad weather, had slammed into their little Fiat and crushed it.
He had not been blighted by poor childhood memories or affected by warring parents or evil stepmothers. Alcohol, drug abuse and infidelity had been conspicuously and thankfully absent from his life. His cautionary tales stemmed from an altogether different source.
He shrugged aside this lapse in concentration as well as any niggling of his conscience, by reminding himself that he was as honourable as they came, because he was always, always upfront in his relationships. He told it like it was.
Sex and fun, but no cosy nights in front of the telly, no meeting the parents.
That said, he was a one-woman man, and any woman he dated would have all of him—if only for a limited amount of time. Largely, he was the one who usually called it a day, but he was perfectly happy if it were the other way around. He was the least possessive man he knew and he liked it that way.
He looked at Maddie in silence for a little while. She’d rebuffed him first time around, and he was sharp enough to pick up that little comment about how it would ‘be nice to have company for a couple of hours’.
‘Tell me where you live,’ he drawled. ‘I’ll pick you up.’
‘You have a car?’
‘I have a fleet of them,’ he said, which was the absolute truth. ‘Of course they’re garaged in London—which is where, incidentally, I have my penthouse apartment—but if you tell me which make you’d prefer, I’ll make sure it’s delivered to me in time to collect you later. So, what’s it to be? Ferrari? Range Rover? BMW? Or maybe something classic like an Aston Martin...?’
Maddie burst out laughing. The guy had a sense of humour and she liked that. She hadn’t laughed for a long time, but now she was laughing so hard that tears came to her eyes.
Finally, sobering up, she said, still smiling, ‘I’ll meet you somewhere. I think there are some cheap and cheerful restaurants we could go to...’
‘I’ll give you my number. Text me. I’ll meet you there at...what? Seven? What time does this place close?’
‘Seven would be great. Now, really, I have to go...’
‘One last thing...’ Leo looked at her seriously. ‘You need not fear that I’ll make a pest of myself. I won’t.’
Maddie reddened and an errant thought flashed through her head,
What would it be like if you were to make a pest of yourself...?
‘Good,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘Because I’ve a lot going on in my life at the moment and the last thing I need is...is...’
‘Fending off a nuisance?’
‘I was going to say that the last thing I need is a relationship.’
At which Leo was the one to burst out laughing. He looked at her with his midnight-blue eyes, ‘Trust me—relationships don’t ever feature on my agenda. See you later, Maddie.’
And he was gone, leaving her standing as still as a statue, even though inside her everything was weirdly mushy, as though she’d just stepped off a death-defying rollercoaster ride and was struggling to get her bearings.
She spent the remainder of the day in a state of low-level excitement. She told herself that this wasn’t a date. Not really. This was dinner with someone who’d made her laugh—because the alternative was yet another night in, going through the mountains of paperwork her solicitor had left for her, trying to work out the best approach to take when she went to see the bank manager for a loan the following week.
She was twenty-four years old! Where was the harm in acting her age? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt young, and the tall, dark, handsome stranger had made her feel young.
And he wasn’t going to be sticking around.
By seven that evening, as she stood outside the cheap Italian restaurant where they’d arranged to meet, the nerves which had abated at some point during the day were back in full swing.
She smoothed down the front of her shirt. No one could accuse her of dressing to impress. She was in a pair of ripped jeans, some flat navy ballet pumps and a tee shirt that was a little tighter than she liked and a little shorter than she might have wanted, exposing a sliver of flat brown skin. It, like the jeans, was faded and worn.
She’d had a brief flirtation with designer dressing. Adam had liked to see her in expensive gear and, much against her will, he had encouraged her into wearing clothes that he’d bought for her—expensive, slinky silk outfits and high, high designer heels.
He’d enjoyed the way everyone’s heads had turned whenever she’d stalked
