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‘We’ve always been honest with each other,’ Leo bit out harshly in the dragging silence that had fallen between them.
‘I saw a newspaper photo of you having lunch with Dido,’ Letty framed flatly, accusingly, failing utterly to hold back that tone of condemnation. ‘I didn’t require anything else to know that you’d returned to your former way of life.’
‘Theé mou,Letty,’ Leo growled. ‘I’m not guilty of that cardinal error. I lunched with Dido, no argument on that score. For a long time I’ve been a theatre angel. I back stage productions that are likely to be successful. That’s how I first met Dido years ago. She was a very good investment.’
‘Investment?’ Letty echoed with raised brows and a frown. ‘I think your ties were rather more intimate than that.’
‘Were being the correct word. Eight years ago, Letty, and there has been no sexual intimacy between us since that ended after an affair that lasted a couple of months,’ Leo clarified. ‘Dido, who is fiercely ambitious, chases me purely for my wealth in the hope of persuading me to invest in her next stage production. But, to be frank, I only had lunch with her in the first place to tell her to back off with the texts and the allegedly accidental meetings and the pretence that we were once a couple. We were never a couple. We were never close…and that’s the truth.’
Letty clamped her hands together because they were trembling, and she didn’t want him to notice that humiliating fact. ‘I’m not sure I can believe—’
‘I’m afraid you have to because I will not accept that one stupid photo can come between you and me!’ Leo countered in a raw undertone.
‘No…’ Letty made an almost clumsy movement with one hand to express her continuing tension. ‘What came between us was your insistence on retaining your freedom as a married man, which meant that naturally when I saw you in company with Dido, I assumed—’
Leo cast off his coat and dug a hand into the inner pocket of his suit jacket to withdraw a folded document. ‘Our prenuptial agreement with that clause removed. You have to sign it too with a witness before it’s legal but please note the date when I signed…’
Her throat tight, her brow indented with uncertainty as she accepted the document and rifled through it to check that the that offensive clause had genuinely been removed and not simply rephrased and slipped in someplace else. He had signed it within a day of her leaving the island, which was a surprise.
As Letty sat down at the foot of the bed to read it all properly, Leo’s mouth quirked with appreciation. ‘You’re never going to take me on trust, are you?’
‘Probably not,’ she agreed, setting the prenuptial contract down beside her on the bed and adding, ‘So… I have to ask…what led to this sudden change of heart. I mean, I know that only a few days before you signed that you were still vehemently insisting that you had to keep that freedom.’
Put on the spot that directly, Leo grimaced. ‘Finding out what my father went through, married to my mother, had an enormous effect on me. It knocked me for six,’ he confessed with faint embarrassment. ‘I have ignored him pretty much all my life because I held onto unfair assumptions about his character but, when I really thought about it, my resentment came down to his inability to control Katrina and the way she treated my sister and me as children. I blamed him for that because he married her. Now I appreciate that he had no idea what was going on in his own home because she never treated us badly when he was around.’
Letty nodded. ‘You had a real heart to heart with him, didn’t you?’ she pressed.
‘And I have you to thank for that because without your intervention I would have gone on with the same mind-set.’ He sighed with regret. ‘Now I have the father I always wanted but didn’t appreciate. Katrina being gone from our lives makes that possible.’
‘Does he know…? I mean, about Katrina coming on to you as well?’ Letty enquired with a grimace of distaste.
‘Yes. There had to be total honesty from both of us. He was devastated when I told him, but I think it also helped him to accept that Katrina never loved him the way he believed she did and, in a sense, it drew a line under all the rest of it,’ he completed grimly. ‘I notice that his state of mind is much improved since I last saw him.’
‘Yes, Mum and he are great buddies,’ Letty remarked. ‘I understand everything that you’re sharing with me but I still don’t understand why you finally decided to remove that clause from the agreement. Just to please me? To lull me into a false sense of security? Why?’
‘Do you believe me about Dido? She was after my financial backing, not me personally,’ Leo stated in frustration. ‘She’s very persistent, and I realised that it would take a personal meeting and a blunt refusal to get her to back off. She’s so vain that she couldn’t see that flattery and flirtation weren’t going to get her anywhere with me, particularly after she had offended my wife. That’s what that lunch was about.’
Letty nodded, wryly amused at that ‘offended my wife’, thrown in as if it was a fact of life that Leo should object to such a sin. ‘Yes, I believe that the lunch was innocent,’ she conceded, feeling a great rolling wave of wounded pain evaporating from her stiff body as she sat there. ‘So, according to you, you’re going to be faithful now…or are you still in the trying to be faithful phase?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘No, I’m all yours, entirely yours,’ Leo stressed, a faint smile lightening the lingering strain etched around his wide sensual mouth. ‘For good.’
Letty frowned. ‘For good?’ she queried in astonishment.
‘You’re not grasping what I’m trying to tell you here, yineka mou,’Leo lamented. ‘A gorgeous blonde in biker leathers came into my office and blew my whole life apart in the space of a day. Within a week I was more fascinated by her than any woman I have ever met. Within two weeks I was so hot for her I was performing mental acrobatics to persuade her into being mine, really mine…but I hadn’t quite come to terms with what I was signing up for. That was my mistake. I came at you like a bull in a china shop before I had thought it all through.’
‘Are you talking about me?’ Letty whispered uncertainly.
‘Letty, who the hell else would I be talking about?’ he groaned, crouching down in front of her. ‘When I said I’m yours for good, I was telling you that I fell head over heels in love with you like a stupid teenager.’
Her lashes fluttered up on wide green eyes as she studied him fixedly. ‘Like a very bright but emotionally stunted teenager,’ she parried.
‘I knew you would put another spin on it…so to try romance with an unromantic and very practical woman and me being a man who has never tried that before either,’ Leo admitted ruefully, ‘I bought this…’
In a state of disbelief at Leo telling her that he had fallen in love with her, Letty watched as he threaded a diamond eternity ring on her finger next to her wedding band. ‘Is that the one I didn’t get for my birthday?’ she asked uneasily.
‘No, it’s an entirely new and much more expensive one and this time it truly expresses what I feel—that I’ve got to have you for ever,’ Leo confessed.
‘Oh…’ Letty was speechless, plunged in the misery of believing she was being forced to welcome home an unfaithful husband and then sent shooting back up to heights she had never dared to even dream of, before being told that she was loved. Leo loved her. It felt as if she was living a dream, a dizzy impossible girlish dream, and she burst into floods of tears, her self-control destroyed.
