none of them will do,’ Leo said smoothly and Sammy paused to frown.
‘Why not?’
He looked at her for a long while in perfect silence and it didn’t take her long to get the message.
‘Too glamorous,’ Sammy said slowly, while she pointlessly wished the ground would open and swallow her, disgorging her somewhere on the other side of the world. ‘You need someone plain and average, someone who would give the right image of a responsible other half, able to take on a young child.’
Accustomed to telling it like it was, Leo had the grace to flush. ‘The women I date would be inappropriate—’ he smoothed over the unvarnished bluntness of her statement ‘—it has nothing to do with looks.’
‘It has everything to do with looks,’ Sammy retorted, her voice shaking. ‘I want you to leave. Right now. I’d love to be able to help your father but I draw the line at being manipulated into playing the part of your dreary fiancée so that you can try and fool the authorities in Australia into believing that you’re a halfway decent guy with a few responsible bones in his body!’
Leo was outraged at the barrage of insults contained in that outburst. Halfway decent guy? A few responsible bones?
He stayed right where he was, a solid mass of sheer physical strength. He wasn’t going anywhere and she would be more than welcome to try and budge him if she wanted. She wouldn’t get far.
‘Leave!’ she snapped.
‘Sit,’ he returned.
‘How dare you come into my house and...and...?’
‘I’m not done with this conversation.’ Leo looked at her steadily and she gritted her teeth in impotent fury.
There was no way she could force him out. He was way too big and far too strong. And he knew it.
‘There’s nothing else to say,’ she told him in a frozen voice. ‘There’s no way you could persuade me to go along with your scheme.’ Those cruelly delivered words from when she was a teenager had rushed back towards her with the force of a freight train. As an awkward, self-conscious adolescent she hadn’t been his type and as a twenty-six-year-old woman she still wasn’t his type...
She didn’t care because, as it happened, he was no more her type than she was his, but it still hurt to have it shoved down her throat.
‘Sure about that?’
Sammy didn’t bother to answer. Her arms were still folded, her face was still a mask of resentment, her legs were still squarely apart as she continued to stare down at him.
He couldn’t have looked more relaxed.
She marvelled how someone who adored his father so much could actually be so odious, but then he was a high-flying businessman with no morals to speak of when it came to women so why was she surprised?
‘One hundred per cent sure,’ she threw at him.
‘Because I haven’t just popped along here to ask a favour without bringing something to the table...’
‘I don’t see what you could possibly bring to the table that could be of any interest to me.’
‘I like the moral high ground,’ he murmured in a voice that left her in no doubt that the moral high ground was the very last thing he liked. ‘But, in my experience, moral high grounds usually have their foundations built on sand. Why don’t you sit down and finish hearing me out? If, at the end of what I have to say, you’re still adamant that you want no part of this arrangement, then so be it. My father will be bitterly disappointed, but that’s life. He won’t be able to accuse me of not trying.’
Sammy hesitated. He wasn’t going anywhere. The wretched man was going to stay put until he had said what he had come to say—the whole speech and nothing but the whole speech.
Why waste time arguing?
She perched on the edge of the chair and waited for him to continue.
He was truly a beautiful human being, she thought. All raven-black hair and piercing black eyes and fantastically chiselled features. It was hardly the time to be thinking this, but she just couldn’t help herself.
Was it any wonder that there weren’t many women between the ages of twenty-one and ninety-one who wouldn’t have crashed into a lamp post to grab a second look?
She tried to imagine one of those women he dated trying to pass herself off as a suitable bride-to-be and, whilst it certainly worked from the gorgeous couple aspect, the whole thing fell apart the second a little girl was put in the equation.
‘Your mother hasn’t been well,’ Leo said quietly. ‘I’m sorry that this is the first time I’ve...commiserated.’
‘She’s going to be fine.’ Sammy tilted her chin at an angle but, as always when she thought about her mother, the tears were never very far away.
‘Yes. I’ve been told the chemotherapy has been successful and that the tumour has shrunk considerably. You must be relieved.’
‘I don’t understand what my mother has to do with any of this.’
‘Then I’ll come straight to the point.’ He hadn’t felt a single qualm when he had considered using money as leverage in this bartering process. This was the world he occupied. It was always a quid pro quo system.
Now, however, he was assailed by a sudden attack of conscience. Something about the way her eyes were glistening and the slight wobble of her full pink lips.
No wonder she and his father got on like a house on fire, he thought. They were equally sentimental.
It was yet another reason why the arrangement would work for them because her emotionalism was guaranteed to get on his nerves. There would be no chance of any lines between them getting blurred.
‘It would appear,’ he said heavily, ‘that there’s a problem with the mortgage repayments on the house your mother’s in.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘The same way you seem to have great insight into my personal life,’ he returned coolly. ‘Our respective parents seem to do an awful lot of confidence sharing. At any rate, the fact is that there is a real threat of the bank closing on the house if the late payments aren’t made soon.’
‘I’ve been to see the bank.’ Sammy’s skin burnt because she hated this sliver of her life being exposed. It was none of his business. ‘Mum’s had to give up her job, with all the treatment, and I’ve had to move to a different, more expensive place here because the landlord in my last place wanted to sell. Plus there’ve been all the additional costs of travelling back and forth every weekend, sometimes during the week, as well. I haven’t been able to contribute as much as I would have liked to the finances but they said they understood at the bank.’
‘Banks,’ Leo informed her kindly, ‘have never been noted for their understanding policies. They’re not charitable organisations. The most sympathetic bank manager, under instruction, will foreclose on a house with very little prior warning.
