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Leonora immediately tensed, waiting for Gabriel to pull back at this display of affection from a stranger, to extricate himself, look awkward, but he didn’t. He just hugged Matías back.
To her shock, instead of feeling reassured, she found that watching Gabriel so at ease with her brother was setting her on edge and bringing up emotions she wasn’t sure she wanted to identify.
When they finally left, Leonora sat tensely beside Gabriel in his car.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘I would have thought you’d be happy to see that Matías and I get along.’
‘He really likes you,’ she had to admit.
Gabriel shrugged nonchalantly. ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’
Suddenly she realised what was at the root of her unease. Gabriel was too used to getting his own way, having people fall in slavish devotion at his feet. He’d taken Matías’s reaction for granted. She was aware that she was irrationally angry with him about that. But it was as if introducing him to Matías had brought home just how quickly and easily she’d let him upend her life. How quickly she’d let herself fall in with his plans.
She looked at him. ‘Matías is vulnerable. If you say you’ll take him to a football match he expects that to happen. If he likes you he trusts you implicitly, which makes him even more vulnerable. Once we marry, my responsibility to him doesn’t disappear. He’s only ever known me as his main carer outside of the school.’
Gabriel shot her a glance. ‘Are you sure we’re just talking about Matías, here?’
Leonora flushed.
‘I have no intention of sidelining anyone once we’re married, but the fact is that you will have other responsibilities. You’ll be my wife, and I have a hectic schedule at the best of times. And once we have children, they’ll obviously take precedence. We’ll have as much support as we need, but I don’t want to entrust my children entirely to the care of staff, as I and my sister were. And as I suspect you and your brother were, until there were no staff.’
That stunned Leonora slightly. ‘You want to be involved in your children’s lives?’
For a moment he said nothing. She saw his jaw clench, and then he said, ‘My parents all but abandoned me and my sister. Left us to our own devices, sent us to schools as far away from them as possible. I was able to handle it. But Estella...she was more vulnerable. I had no idea how badly she was affected. Because of our age gap, when she was a teenager and home for the holidays I was already working in the business. I missed the signs...’
‘The signs of what?’
‘Signs that she was falling in with a wrong crowd. People happy to take advantage of her limitless wealth, her name and vulnerability.’
Leonora’s chest tightened. ‘What happened?’
Gabriel was grim, hands tightly on the wheel. ‘I found her passed out at home a few years ago. She was unconscious. Nearly dead. I got her to hospital and into rehab and since then she’s been doing really well. But the neglect of our parents was a direct cause of her pain and I’ll never forgive myself for not seeing it.’
‘You weren’t her parent. It wasn’t your job.’
He glanced at her, and the look on his face made her shiver. ‘No. But I knew she wasn’t like me. I won’t lie—I don’t know the first thing about relating to children—but I know that ours will not be neglected and left to fend for themselves.’
Ours. Their children.
They stopped at traffic lights and he looked at her. ‘Unless you have other ideas?’
Leonora was still reeling from what he’d just said. She realised he was waiting for an answer. ‘No. I want to be involved. Our upbringing wasn’t so dissimilar. Until my father lost everything my parents were absent a lot. It was just me and Matías until he went away to school. I can’t imagine having children and letting someone else raise them.’
Some of the harshness in Gabriel’s expression softened. ‘I know Matías is vulnerable and that he takes everything literally. I’ve made a commitment to you and he’s part of that. All your family are.’
Emotion rose inside Leonora. For the first time in years she felt a weight being lifted off her shoulders. She looked away in case he saw it.
The lights turned green.
A car beeped behind them and Gabriel said, ‘Leo, we’re not moving till you look at me.’
She swallowed her emotion and turned her head. The car beeped again.
Gabriel was unfazed. ‘Do you trust me?’
More cars beeped. But the awful thing was that Leonora didn’t need the pressure of the traffic building behind them to tell her that yes, she did trust him.
She felt as if she was falling off a cliff edge, with nothing to hold on to. When had she allowed herself to trust him so implicitly? How had that even happened? Had it been just now, when he’d spoken of his sister? Or the moment she’d decided to sleep with him? Or the moment she’d seen him being so kind with Matías?
