needed her mother.
The aching sadness of it struck Eliza anew. How devastating for a little toddler to have lost the most important person in her life. How terrifying it must be for little Alessandra when she woke during the night and wanted the comfort of her mother’s arms, only to find a series of paid nannies to see to her needs. No wonder she was difficult. Even a sighted child would be hard to manage after suffering the loss of her mother.
‘What do you hope to gain for her from my period as her nanny?’ she asked.
‘You’re an excellent teacher. You understand small children.’
‘I’ve never worked with a vision impaired child before, only a profoundly deaf one,’ Eliza said.
‘I’m sure you’ll find a way to make the most of your time with her,’ he said. ‘After all, I’m paying you top dollar.’
She frowned. ‘It’s not about the money.’
A dark brow arched over his left eye. ‘No?’
‘Of course not.’ She pulled at her lip momentarily with her teeth. ‘Don’t get me wrong—I’m happy about your donation to the school, but I’m not in this for what I can get for myself. I’m not that sort of person.’
‘Is your fiancé rich?’
Eliza felt the searing penetration of his cynical gaze. The insurance payout from the accident, along with the modest trust fund his late father had bequeathed Ewan had provided a reasonably secure income for the rest of his life. Without it, he and his mother, who was his chief carer, would have really struggled. ‘He has enough to provide for his…I mean our future.’
‘What does he do for a living?’ Leo asked.
She looked at him numbly. What could she say? Should she tell him about Ewan’s accident? Would it make a difference to how he thought of her? Explaining the accident would mean revealing her part in it. She could still see Ewan’s face, the shock in his eyes and the pain of rejection in every plane and contour of his face. He had looked as if she had dealt him a physical blow. Even his colour had faded to a chalk-white pallor. For so long since she had wondered if she could have prepared him better for her decision to end things. It must have come as such a dreadful shock to him for her to announce it so seemingly out of the blue. She had been struggling with their relationship for months but hadn’t said anything. But over that time she had found it harder and harder to envisage a future with him. Her love for him had been more like one would have for a friend rather than a life partner. Sex had become a bit of a chore for her. But she had felt so torn because he and his mother were the only family she had known after a lifetime of foster home placements.
And he had loved her.
That had always been the hardest thing to get her head around when it came to her final decision to end things. Ewan had loved her from the first moment he had helped her pick up the books she had dropped on her first day of term in sixth form after she had been placed with yet another foster family. She’d been the new kid in town and he had taken her under his wing and helped her to fit in. Being loved by someone had been a new experience for her. Up until that point she had always felt out of place, a burden that people put up with because it was the right thing to do for a kid in need. Being loved by Ewan had made her feel better about herself, more worthy, beautiful even.
But she hadn’t loved him the same way he loved her.
‘He has his own business,’ she finally said, which was in a way not quite a lie. ‘Investments, shares, that sort of thing.’
Marella came in just then, which shifted the conversation in another direction once they had taken their places at the table.
Eliza didn’t feel much like eating. Her stomach was knotted and her temples were throbbing, signalling a tension headache was well on its way. She looked across at Leo and he didn’t seem to be too hungry either. He had barely touched his entrée and took only a token couple of sips of the delicious wine he had poured for them both. His brow was furrowed and his posture tense. She sensed a brooding anger in him that he was trying to control for the sake of politeness or maybe because he was concerned Marella would come in on them with the rest of their meal.
‘You blame me, don’t you?’ Eliza said into the cavernous silence.
His eyes were like diamonds, hard and impenetrable. ‘What makes you say that?’
She drew in a sharp breath as she put her napkin aside. ‘Look—I understand your frustration and despair over your daughter’s condition but I hardly see that I’m in any way to blame.’
He pushed back from his chair so quickly the glasses on the table rattled. ‘You lied to me,’ he said through tight lips. ‘You lied to me from the moment we met.’
Eliza rose to her feet rather than have him tower over her so menacingly. ‘You lied to yourself, Leo. You wanted a wife and you chose the first woman to fit your checklist.’
‘Why did you come on to me in that bar that night?
She found it hard to hold his burning gaze. ‘I was at a loose end. I was jet-lagged and lonely. I have no other excuse. I would never do something like that normally. I can’t really explain it even now.’
‘Let me tell you why you did it.’ His top lip curled in disdain. ‘You were feeling horny. Your fiancé was thousands of miles away. You needed a stand-in stud to scratch your itch.’
‘Stop it!’ Eliza clamped her hands over her ears. ‘Stop saying such horrible things.’
He pulled her hands down from her face, his fingers like handcuffs around her wrists. The blood sizzled in her veins at the contact. She felt every pore of her skin flare to take more of him in. Her inner core contracted as her body remembered how it had felt to have him thrusting inside her. His first possession four years ago had been rough, almost animalistic and yet she had relished every heart-stopping, pulse-racing second of it.
‘You still want it, don’t you?’
‘No,’ she said but her body was already betraying her. It moved towards him, searching for him, hungering for him, aching for him.
‘Liar.’ He brought her chin up, his eyes blazing with fiery intent.
‘Don’t do this,’ she said but she wasn’t sure if she was pleading with him or herself.
‘You still want me. I saw it that first day when I came to your flat.’
‘You’re wrong.’ She tried to deny it even as her pelvis brushed against his in feverish need.
He grasped her by the bottom and pushed her hard into his arousal. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? You’re desperate for it, just like you were four years ago.’
Eliza tried to push him away but it was like a stick insect trying to shift a skyscraper from its foundations. ‘Stop it,’ she begged. ‘Please stop saying that.’ A bubble of emotion rose in her throat. She tried to swallow it back down but it refused to go away. She didn’t want to break down in front of him. She hated that weakness in her, the one where she became overwhelmed and crumbled emotionally. It was the abandoned little seven-year-old girl in her who did that.
She
