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By the time Leo came back to bed, Grace was sound asleep. Around dawn she shifted up against Leo and the sheer novelty value of being in bed with another person was probably what awakened him. In the darkness, he lay still, listening to Grace’s even breathing. He frowned and very gently removed the arm he had inexplicably draped round Grace before quietly easing out of the bed to pull on jeans and a shirt. He padded through to the vast expanse of the main reception room and checked his phone for messages.
There was a text from his father: Anatole would be in London on Saturday and wanted to know if Leo would still be around. Leo almost groaned out loud. He would be on the other side of the world by then but he now needed to move Grace to another location because the London apartment was used by both his father and his brother. Leaving Grace in residence would entail explanations that Leo was not yet ready to make.
He raked impatient fingers through his tousled black hair. What was he playing at? What the hell had he been playing at when he took Grace back to bed again? That was no answer to the mess they were both in and had probably only complicated everything more. He was maddened by his sudden unprecedented loss of restraint and discipline the night before and exasperated by what he saw as his own irrational behaviour.
Sex had always been a purely physical exercise for Leo. Anything even one step beyond simple sex was dangerous in his view because it could open him up to the risk of destructive attachments and desires. He had not had to worry about that before because he had never connected in any more lasting way with a woman he had been intimate with.
He swore under his breath, grasping that it was a little late in the day to acknowledge that he was getting in too deep with Grace Donovan. Hadn’t they enough of a connection in the child she had conceived? Getting involved in an affair with Grace would be foolish because when it finished relations would inevitably sour between them and potentially damage his future relationship with his child. Why hadn’t he thought about that reality? Why hadn’t he thought about what he would be encouraging if he had sex with her again? Most probably raising expectations he was highly unlikely to fulfil?
As Leo poured himself a whiskey from a crystal decanter it seemed to him that his libido had been doing all his thinking for him. That shook him inside out. In fact he broke out in a cold sweat at that knowledge while he paced the pale limestone floor. He drained his glass and set it down with a definitive snap. Was he more like his father than he had ever suspected? Too weak and selfish to behave honourably? More likely than most men to succumb to a sexual obsession? After all, Anatole Zikos had promised repeatedly to end his relationship with Bastien’s mother but somehow he had always ended up drifting back to Athene while coming up with one excuse after another. In truth Anatole had been too obsessed with Athene to ever give her up and her death had devastated him.
Leo was all too well aware that he was the son of almost neurotically volatile parents, who had remained locked in an emotional triangle of high drama throughout their marriage. His home life had been a nightmare and when he had visited his friends’ homes he had marvelled at the quiet normality that they took for granted. When it came to what he viewed as his dodgy genes, Leo had always been relieved that he appeared to have skipped that over-emotional inheritance and was far too cold-blooded and logical to become obsessed with any woman. Indeed since his troubled childhood had taught him to mask his feelings and rigorously suppress or avoid any more intense reactions he had struggled to deal with any strong emotion.
But that approach wasn’t likely to work for a male who had conceived a child with another woman in the run-up to his own wedding, Leo conceded bleakly. Everyone concerned had a right to strong emotions in a scenario like that. He had made the same mistake his father had—he had got the wrong woman pregnant. Wilfully or accidentally—did it matter which? Unlike his father, however, he would not compound his error by marrying a different woman and dragging her into the same shameful chaos. He had some tough decisions to make, he acknowledged grimly. It was no longer a matter of something as self-indulgent as what he wanted, but more a matter of honour. Such an old-fashioned word, that, Leo conceded ruefully, but if it meant that he accepted the need to put logic and fairness at the top of his list, it perfectly encapsulated his duty. And unlike his father, Leo planned to put his child first and foremost.
