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Leo could literally feel himself freezing into an ice pillar while still wanting to strangle her into silence. Did he deserve such a character assassination? Well, so much for the winning power of a marriage proposal and a rich and powerful husband! But offended and infuriated as he was by Grace and the awareness that he had seriously underestimated her temper, he was more fixated on where she planned to go when she appeared to have neither money nor any suitable friends or family to live with. Recognising that Grace needed to cool off before he could even hope to reason with her, he reached into his wallet to withdraw a card and extended it.
‘I own the hotel. It’s small and discreet and you only need to show the card at Reception to be accommodated. My driver will take you there...’
In the grip of frantic thought and the blistering emotional turmoil that their encounter had provoked, Grace accepted the card. She had to go somewhere and she had no place else, she thought wretchedly, and ditched her pride. ‘OK.’
A shard of relief speared through Leo’s almost overwhelming sense of rage and raw frustration. She wouldn’t listen to him, she refused to listen, refused to let him talk...how fair was that? He hated feeling powerless, an unfamiliar sensation because she was the only person who had ever had that effect on him. Even so, it was of paramount importance to Leo that he knew where she was and that she was safe and well looked after. She had got him wrong, so wrong, he thought bitterly.
In Leo’s limo, Grace dug out her phone to check it and called back her aunt.
‘I need to see you urgently,’ Della Donovan said in an unusually constrained voice.
Grace wondered what on earth had happened to make her aunt approach her because she was fairly certain that Jenna’s dislike of her had initially been learned from her mother. Compressing her lips, she agreed to meet up for coffee that afternoon. Had her uncle pressured his wife into burying the hatchet and healing the breach? The suspicion worried her. Declan Donovan was a kind man but, sadly, such feelings couldn’t be forced.
The hotel was small, unassuming from the outside but the last word in elegant opulence and service on the inside. Within minutes of her presenting the card, her luggage was collected and she was settled in a large and beautiful room complete with every possible luxury. The bathroom was a dream and as soon as she had unpacked Grace laid out clean clothes for her meeting with her aunt and went for a bath in an effort to relax her sadly frayed nerves.
She felt so unhappy. In all her life, Grace had never felt quite so unhappy. She had always been alone but she had never felt lonelier than she did at that moment, cut off from everything familiar and at her third change of address in the space of a week. The following week term started and she would be back in class and facing hospital placements. But for the first time ever Grace wasn’t looking forward to getting back to her studies. The events of the past worrying weeks had taken their toll and she was exhausted.
Leo had broken off his engagement so that he could ask her to marry him. A sudden involuntary surge of tears stung Grace’s gritty eyes. Only now was her brain calmed enough to consider that truth. He was trying so hard to do the right thing even though he had started out doing the wrong thing by not telling her that he was engaged. Did she give him points for that? Grace heaved a heavy sigh. She had been falling in love with him, weaving dreams, seeing a future that might include him, and then Marina had blown that fantasy out of the water. Marina had spelt out the reality that Leo had not only lied to Grace, but was also a regular playboy. That crack Marina had made in which she admitted having expected Grace to be a blonde bombshell in a pole dancer’s outfit had lingered longest with Grace. Evidently Leo had betrayed his fiancée more than once. He was a liar and a cheat just like her father, who had also turned out to be a great deal less interested in raising his own child than he had first pretended to be.
* * *
Della Donovan was seated in a corner of the busy coffee shop when Grace arrived. She was immaculate in a smart suit, her blonde hair in a chignon; her critical gaze scanned her niece in her trademark jeans. And for the first time ever, Grace felt like picking up on that faintly scornful appraisal and asking when she had ever had the money to dress as smartly as the rest of the family. She suppressed the urge, recognising that now that she had moved out of her aunt’s home, where she had always had to watch every word to keep the peace, such humility no longer came naturally to her.
