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A thin fall of snow had begun hours earlier and was trying hard to gather pace.
Finding out where Celia lived had been a piece of cake. He could have used one of his people to find out, but that felt like a distasteful invasion of privacy. Instead, he had gone to the shop and one of her assistants had been more than happy to provide the information. And why not? His ex-fiancée had been one of their biggest clients. Why would they withhold information?
That had been a day and a half ago.
He could have bypassed Celia and just headed up to Scotland himself, but with a man involved...
Things had become complicated, far more complicated than Leandro could ever have predicted when he and Julie had embarked on their joint plan to save her father from penury while salvaging his pride in the process.
He owed Charles more than money could buy and this had been his way of repaying the debt to the best of his ability.
And Julie, who had left her first marriage and had resolved never to go there again, had seen the sense of their arrangement.
But love?
Was that what had happened?
Leandro found it incomprehensible. What was the point of a learning curve if you didn’t learn from it? Julie had been embittered by her first awful marriage. Why would she want to test the waters again when it came to her emotions?
Leandro was proud of his resolute stance when it came to harnessing all emotion. He could value the love he had for his father, mingled as it was with pity for the chances he had never taken because he had allowed the past to dictate his future. He could appreciate the depth of affection he had for Charles, who had been instrumental in helping him in his education. But he couldn’t begin to understand, particularly after a bruising experience at the hands of someone else, why anyone would want to voluntarily go there again.
He, thankfully, had been smart enough to make sure he’d protected himself from the folly of losing his head to any woman and he was genuinely puzzled as to Julie’s abrupt departure from lessons learnt.
Celia’s enthusiastic and admiring descriptions of her brother as someone who scorned the trappings of routine and preferred the call of adventure had got every pore in Leandro’s body bristling with justified scepticism, and the very view of this row of terraced houses staring at him now should have consolidated the suspicion that here were a likely pair of con artists, but no.
Something about Celia, something about the honesty in those amazing green eyes, had opened a door to the notion that she might just be right.
Julie might well and truly have fallen in love. Or else,thoughtshe had fallen in love.
Which would scupper all their well-made plans to help her father, to rescue him from the financial bind now wrapped around him like tentacles.
But that was not why he was here, important though it was to at least try and find out what exactly was going on and find a way to a solution by hook or by crook.
He was here...because fate had decided to lend a very unhelpful hand.
With a sigh, Leandro slid out of the car and felt the sting of bitter cold working its way through his jeans and jumper and cashmere coat.
The house where she lived was neat, the tiny front garden tidy. They all were. There were lights on inside and he wondered what he might have done had she not been in. Driven a couple of blocks and then returned, he presumed, but in this weather it was a relief that he wouldn’t have to, and he banged on the knocker, two raps, and waited.
From nowhere, he had a vivid image in his head of her—those expressive green eyes, the freckles, the riot of red hair, unrestrained, no pretence at elegance. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, feeling the stir of something inside him he didn’t want to identify.
He was hardly starved of sex. He had had one very discreet and short-lived relationship on a three-month stint in New York while he and Julie had been engaged, for theirs was to be a respectful but sexless union, and sensible rules had been put in place for obvious reasons.
But all of a sudden, his libido had kicked into gear and, just as fast, Leandro put the brakes on that. With all inappropriate thoughts swiftly uprooted at source, he lounged against the doorframe and waited.
It was a little after six. Snow was falling outside and Celia, barricaded in her cocoon of warmth, was guiltily relieved that she wasn’t going anywhere, even though she should have been, really, because it was Saturday night and she was young, free and single.
Plus, after that nerve-wracking encounter with Leandro, she had started thinking that she had to do something, had to venture into the world of dating, of finding someone.
The fact that he had managed to get under her skin the way he had had been a bit of a wake-up call.
If a guy like him, someone who did not meet any of the internal checks she had in place when it came to the opposite sex, couldget to her, then something had to be done.
Very soon.
When the weather improved, she had resolved, gently turning down the offer of an evening out with the girls she worked with.
Who wanted to tramp through the snow to get to a crowded bar in Soho for drinks?
