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Brianna half-stood and then fell back onto the chair as though the air had been knocked out of her lungs.
His mother was Bridget. Bridget McGuire. And all of a sudden everything began falling into place with sickening impact. Perhaps not immediately, but very quickly, he had ascertained that she knew Bridget, that she considered Bridget one of her closest friends. Try as she might, Brianna couldn’t reference the time scale of this conversation. Had it happened before he’d decided to prolong his stay? Surely it would have?
That realisation was like a physical blow because with it came the inevitable conclusion that he had used her. He had wanted to find out about his mother and she had been an umbilical cord to information he felt he might have needed; to soften her up and raise no suspicions, he had assumed the spurious identity of a writer. When he had been sitting in front of his computer, she’d assumed that he had been working on his book. Now, as head of whatever vast empire he ran, she realised he would have been working, communicating with the outside world from the dreary isolation of a small town in Ireland he would never have deigned to visit had he not needed to.
How could she have been so stupid, so naive? She had swooned like a foolish sixteen-year-old the second she had clapped eyes on him and had had no qualms about justifying her decision to leap into bed with him.
She had been his satisfying bonus for being stuck in the boondocks.
‘I didn’t even know that Bridget had ever had children... Does she know?’ Her voice was flat and devoid of any expression.
That, without the tears, told him all he needed to know about her state of mind. He had brought this on himself and he wasn’t going to flinch from this difficult conversation. He told himself that there had never been any notion of a long-lasting relationship with her, yet the repetition of that mantra failed to do its job, failed to make him feel any better.
‘No. She doesn’t.’
‘And when will you tell her?’
‘When I feel the time is right.’
‘If you wanted to find your mother and announce yourself—if you weren’t suspicious that she would try and con money out of you—then why the secrecy? Why didn’t you just do us all a favour: show up in your fancy car and present yourself as the long-lost prodigal son?’
‘Because I didn’t know what I was going to find, but I suspected that what I found would—how shall I put this?—not be to my liking.’
‘Hence all your warnings about her when I told you that she was going to be coming to the pub to stay after her bout in hospital...’ Brianna said slowly, feeling the thrust of yet another dagger deep down inside her. ‘You knew she was hiding a past and you assumed she was a lowlife who would end up taking advantage of me, stealing from me, even. What changed?’
Leo shrugged and Brianna rose to her feet and managed to put distance between them. For a few seconds she stared down at the eerily lit landscape below her, devoid of people, just patches of light interspersed with darkness. Then she returned to the chair and this time she forced herself to try and relax, to give him no opportunity to see just how badly she was affected by what he had said to her.
‘So you were using me all along,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You came to Ballybay with a purpose, found out that it wasn’t going to be as straightforward as you anticipated—because it’s the kind of small place where everybody knows everybody else, so you wouldn’t be able to pass unnoticed, without comment—you adopted an identity and the second you found out that I knew your mother...sorry, your birth mother...you decided that it would be an idea to get to know me better.’
Leo’s jaw hardened. Her inexorable conclusions left a bitter taste in his mouth but he wasn’t going to rail against them. What was needed here was a clean break. If she had become too involved, then what was the point in encouraging further involvement by entering into a debate on what he had meant or not meant to do?
His failure to deny or confirm her statement was almost more than Brianna could bear but she kept her voice cool and level and willed herself just to try and detach from the situation. At least here, now; later, she would release the emotion that was building inside her, piling up like water constrained by paper-thin walls, ready to burst its banks and destroy everything in its path.
She could read nothing from his expression. Where was the guy she had laughed with? Made love to? Teased? Who was this implacable stranger sitting in front of her?
How, even more fatally, could she have made such a colossal mistake again? Misjudged someone so utterly that their withdrawal came as complete shock? Except this time it was all so much worse. She had known him for a fraction of the time she had known Daniel. Yet she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the impact Daniel had made on her all those years ago was nothing in comparison to what she would feel when she walked away from this. How was that possible? And yet she knew that what Leo had generated inside her had reached deeper and faster and was more profound in a million ways.
