and pushing some of his papers askew. ‘I’m still the same person I was when you were driving me wild for you upstairs.’
‘No, you’re not! You’re as bad as every other company man—’ she breathed it with venom ‘—I’ve ever met. Only worse. Because you’ve arrived! And to think I was trying to suggest things you could do to make life better for yourself!’ She couldn’t believe she could have been so stupid. Such an unbelievable fool!
‘Which I found very endearing,’ he added earnestly.
‘Don’t touch me!’ She made a small panicked sound as he took another step towards her, the thought of what his lips and hands could do to her exciting her in a way that made her feel sick with herself. ‘You know exactly what I think about men like you!’
‘Then we’ve both been misguided,’ he concluded, his shoulders drooping, suddenly seeming to give up trying to placate her. ‘You for taking everything at face value, and I for imagining I could get away with letting you. I just wanted to believe that for a while at least my name and my money weren’t the most important things about me.’
There was something in his voice that had her silently querying the inscrutable emotion in that strong, rugged face. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel bad?’ she challenged. ‘Because it doesn’t.’
‘No. I’ve already told you,’ he persisted. ‘It wasn’t my intention to hurt you, or to let things go as far as they did.’
‘And what about Philomena?’ Her gaze had fallen to the bag with the loaf the woman had lovingly baked for him. ‘Does she know?’ she threw at him, hurting, remembering how eagerly she had driven up here to see him, with nothing but making him want her on her mind. ‘Does she know what a fool you’ve been taking me for? Or didn’t you risk telling her?’
Thick black lashes came down over his incredibly dark eyes. ‘I’ve never taken you for a fool,’ he stated, exhaling deeply. ‘As for Philomena...she knows I had my reasons.’
‘And she went along with them?’ She couldn’t believe that of the gentle yet down-to-earth Philomena.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
She remembered the argument that had ensued the day he’d first taken her down to the cottage, the remonstrations by Philomena since, which seemed to leave him no more than mildly amused.
‘You’re despicable,’ she breathed, as a fragment of memory tugged at her consciousness in relation to something he had said about having had a trying year.
Unscrupulous. Ruthless. Riding roughshod over people. Those were words she had heard in connection with the name Leonidas Vassalio. And then she remembered. It was that stunning American model turned actress—Esmeralda Leigh. She’d publicly named him as having fathered her child. It was she who had called him unscrupulous, when he had challenged the proof of his paternity—though there had been no close-up photograph of him in the article Kayla remembered reading. Just a long shot of him leaving his office, looking rather different from how he looked now, which had been inset in a full-colour spread of Esmeralda lounging in the drawing room of her exquisitely and expensively furnished Mayfair home.
‘Esmeralda was right. You are unscrupulous!’
‘And if you had read the outcome of that fiasco you would have the sense to realise that anything the woman says is fabricated. Her claims were proven to be totally untrue.’
‘Well, she wasn’t the only one who was good at lying, was she?’ Kayla reminded him grievously, realising now what he’d meant that day when he’d referred to a petition being slapped on him. ‘Was it because of her that you decided to get your own back when you met me? Were you afraid if I knew who you were I might try and get pregnant so I could use you as a ticket to an easy life? Well, stuff your money! And stuff you! Not everyone puts as much value on money as on truth and integrity! I might not be in your league when it comes to material wealth, but at least I can hold my head up and know that what you see is what you get. That everything about me is real. You wouldn’t understand that if it was scrawled all over one of your concrete eyesores, and as far as I’m concerned, Mr Vassalio, I never want to see you again!’
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