must. Now, are you going to let me in?’ He stood back and raked his hands impatiently through his hair. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said heavily, ‘that I was the only father who didn’t make it to the Sports Day.’ It was a concession of sorts and as close to an olive branch that Leo was going to offer.
Situation defused.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘No, I’m not. Every single parent was there, taking pictures. Daniel had asked me to come along to watch, pretended that he didn’t care whether you came or not, but I watched him, and he kept looking around for you, wondering if you were somewhere in the crowd.’
‘Are you going to let me in?’ Leo asked brusquely, not liking this image of himself as some kind of heartless monster.
Heather reluctantly opened the door and allowed him to stride past her. She hadn’t noticed earlier, but he dominated the space—not just because he was tall, but because of that aura he exuded, an aura of supreme power. He owned the air around him in a way that Brian never had, even though it had seemed so at the time. She shivered.
‘So, where were you painting?’ Leo asked, looking around him. He had quizzed his mother about Heather, ignoring her look of surprise at his interest, and had gleaned that she and Daniel trotted over to the cottage whenever they had a chance. Heather had, it would seem, become quite a fixture in the household. Little wonder that she had been polishing her soapbox in anticipation of his arrival.
He followed her into a room at the back of the house, and was confronted by walls on which hung every manner of artwork. Yet more were housed in an antique architect’s chest against the wall.
‘I broke my glass,’ Heather said, kneeling down so that she could begin carefully picking up the shards. ‘When you banged on the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone.’
‘You…paint?’
Heather looked briefly at him and blushed, suddenly feeling vulnerable as those flint-grey eyes roved over the artwork on her walls. ‘I told you that I had a job,’ she said, before resuming her glass-collecting task. It would take a heck of a lot more elbow grease to fully clean the ground, but the biggest bits had been collected; the elbow grease would have to wait until the morning, because right now she was finding it hard to think properly. She just wanted him out of her cottage so that she could get her scattered wits back into order.
Leo dragged his eyes away from the paintings and focused entirely on the woman standing in front of him. When she had told him that she had a job, he had assumed something along the lines of a secretary, maybe a receptionist somewhere, perhaps. But she was an artist, and it explained a lot. Her apparent lack of any recognisable fashion sense, her woolly-headed assumption that she could say whatever she wanted to say without thinking, her earnest belief that she could somehow solve a situation over a cup of tea and a good chat. Artists occupied a different world to most normal people. It was common knowledge they lived in a world of their own.
He refocused on the matter at hand. ‘I don’t know how you’ve managed to form such a strong bond with my son,’ he said, not beating about the bush. ‘But after the Sports Day…situation…it seems that the only way this weekend isn’t going to descend into a nightmare is if you…’ Leo searched around to find the right words. It wasn’t in his nature to ask favours of anyone, and having to do so now left a sour taste in his mouth. He especially didn’t like asking favours from a woman who got on his nerves. Moreover, he would have to be pleasant towards her.
Leo had tried his damnedest to form a bond with his son, but there was murky water under the bridge, and he had had time to reflect that it wasn’t Daniel’s fault. Without a great deal of difficulty, he could see any relationship he might have with his son sink without trace beneath a tide of remembered bitterness.
‘If I…what?’
‘Movies…lunch…dinner. I leave on Sunday afternoon,’ he felt compelled to tack on because he could see the dawning dismay spreading across her face.
‘You mean you want me to sacrifice my entire weekend to bail you out of a situation you can’t handle?’
‘Sacrifice?’ Leo laughed drily. ‘I don’t think there’s a woman alive who has ever seen a weekend spent in my company as a sacrifice.’
‘That’s the problem,’ Heather said. ‘Men like you never do.’
CHAPTER TWO
LEO decided to leave that half-muttered remark alone. Why get embroiled in a lengthy question-and-answer session with a woman who was an irrelevance in his life? On a more practical note, he needed her for the weekend, because he couldn’t face a day and a half of his son’s withdrawn sadness. If she could smooth things over, then far be it from him to invite further hostility from her. As far as he was concerned, though, all this interest in a kid who happened to live a couple of fields away from her spoke of an unhealthy lack of social life, but each to their own.
By lunchtime the following day—having spent the morning at the zoo, where his son had displayed an amazing knowledge of animals, rattling off facts to Heather and his mother while studiously ignoring him—Leo was beginning to feel his curiosity piqued.
She exuded warmth, and when she laughed, which she seemed to do often, it was a rich, infectious laughter.
Of course the laughter, like his son’s encyclopaediac knowledge of every animal, was not directed at him.
Over a cup of tea in the canteen at the zoo—which Leo could only describe as a marginally more savoury experience than if he had actually pulled his chair into one of the animal enclosures—he noticed that the woman was not strictly limited to conversations about dinosaurs, reptiles and computer games. When his mother asked him about work, in an attempt to include him in the conversation, Leo was taken aback to be quizzed about the politics of mergers and acquisitions in so far as they affected the lives of countless hapless victims of ‘marauding conglomerates’.
While his mother tried to hide her amusement, Leo stared at Heather as though she had mutated into one of the animals they had just been feeding.
Marauding conglomerates? Since when did country bumpkins use expressions like that?
He also didn’t like the way her mouth curled with scorn when she addressed him, but in front of his mother and Daniel there was nothing he could do but smile coldly at her and change the subject.
Now, with the animals out of the way, he was taking them all to lunch; that nasty little remark she had flung at him the evening before, the remark which he had generously chosen to overlook, was beginning to prey on his mind.
Just who the hell did the woman think she was? Did she imagine that because she was doing him a favour she could indulge in whatever cheap shot she wanted at his expense?
People rarely got under Leo’s skin. This particularly applied to women. He was astute when it came to reading their feminine wiles, and could see through any minor sulk to exactly what lay underneath. In short, they were a predictable entity.
As they headed for the Italian on the main street, he stuck his hands in his pockets and murmured, bending so that his words were for her ears only,
‘Artist and financial expert, hmm? A woman of many talents. I had no idea you
