AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Not any more, I hope.’ He yawned. ‘Orgasm is supposed to release stress.’
‘Temporarily, I believe. But now it’s back again. I can tell.’
‘You’re very observant.’ He yawned again.
‘Mmm. I know. It’s an acquired skill. Comes from years of watching people in the mirror. I can always tell if there’s something on their mind. And there’s definitely something on yours.’ She hesitated for a moment before she started speaking very carefully, as if she were reading from a crib sheet. ‘Do you want to...to move on?’
‘Move on?’ He looked at her with genuine bewilderment. ‘Move on where?’
‘From me.’
His eyes narrowed as it slowly dawned on him what she meant. It was honest and upfront but if she was expecting him to make a declaration that he would never leave her, then she was about to be disappointed. ‘No, Marnie. I don’t want that but when I do, I can assure you that you’ll be the first to know. Is that a deal?’ He wondered if she would find his honesty unsettling, but her careless shrug reassured him.
‘Deal,’ she said, turning onto her side to face him. ‘So, now do you want to tell me what’s bothering you?’
‘You don’t usually ask questions.’
‘No, but you don’t usually keep scowling like that either.’
Leon stared into the up-close focus of her features because the crazy thing was that he did want to tell her. Crazy because his usual instinct would be to shut the topic right down. But there was something about the way she was talking which felt more like concern than prying. He didn’t get the feeling she wanted to discover more about him because that would increase her influence over him, or because one day she might try to use it against him. He was no stranger to power games with women, but there had never been any with her. In fact, she had been the soul of discretion since their affair had begun. She’d explained that she hadn’t told anyone at work about it—‘They’d only try to talk me out of it, like my sister.’—which he had found slightly insulting. Her words had been backed up by a lack of prurient calls from diary columnists, trying to find out why he was dating someone like her.
He swallowed. She was unlike any woman he’d ever known, that was for sure. She confounded his expectations at every turn. Was that why he was tempted to confide in her? Because, on some unfamiliar level, he felt he could trust her not to take this any further?
‘My father is getting married and I have to go to the wedding.’
‘Have to?’ Her grey eyes narrowed. ‘I can’t imagine you doing anything you don’t want to, Leon.’
‘Your faith is touching.’ His voice hardened. ‘Put it this way—the publicity and conjecture surrounding a no-show would be far worse.’
She pushed a thick handful of hair away from her flushed face. ‘Let me guess. You don’t like your new stepmother?’
The suggestion was almost comic in the circumstances but Leon didn’t smile. ‘It would be difficult to attribute that particular role to a woman who, at twenty-four, is almost a decade my junior.’
‘So she’s—’
‘I think the term you might be looking for is trophy wife,’ he offered caustically. ‘And there’s no need to look so concerned, Marnie—I’m used to it. This will be my father’s fourth wedding, but the third was far worse—or rather, that particular stepmother was.’
There was a pause. Her soft lips became suddenly sombre, as if she had detected the new and bitter note which had entered his voice.
‘So was she cruel, like in all the fairy tales?’
The silence which followed was broken only by the sound of their breathing. ‘No,’ he said, at last. ‘I almost wish she had been.’ He waited for her to comment because that would have been a distraction—an intrusion—and might have halted the dark flow of his words. But when she didn’t, he found himself lost in the past. Talking as if nobody were listening. Saying things to Marnie Porter that he’d never told another soul.
CHAPTER NINE
‘MY FATHER WAS a shipbuilder,’ Leon began, pushing the sheet away from his bare torso. ‘And one of the wealthiest men in Greece.’
His words faded away and for a moment Marnie thought he’d forgotten she was there. ‘That explains how you got so rich, I guess,’ she prompted.
‘Actually, it doesn’t.’ His words became coated with acid. ‘I took nothing from him.’
‘Isn’t that unusual?’ she questioned slowly. ‘For a man not to help his kids out financially?’
‘I believe so. Though he certainly didn’t have any problem showering wealth on my two older stepbrothers from his first marriage. But by the time I was a teenager, we were estranged.’
There was a space in the conversation which demanded to be filled. ‘Why was that?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a long story.’
