On her way to the four-wheel drive in which she and Sam but not Leandro would be travelling to the cottage, she paused to look at herself in the mirror.
She’d found her own style. She wasn’t interested in flashy designer labels and, left to her own devices, with Leandro’s explicit instructions ringing in her ears, she had gravitated towards the clothes she had more or less always worn but this time well cut, well tailored and just that bit smarter. Today, she was in a pair of perfectly fitting designer jeans with designer rips at the knees and a polo shirt with a very small, very discreet logo over the breast pocket. Blue jeans and a white top, accompanied by a pair of flat, tan-and-white leather pumps. She looked stylish.
From behind, she registered Leandro strolling towards her, Sam in his arms.
She knew that, to any outsider, they looked as if they could have stepped straight out of the pages of a magazine. She turned and smiled. ‘I’m surprised he’s not demanding to get down.’ Abigail reached out for her son who lunged for her and then, predictably, squirmed until they settled him on the ground. These days he crawled and cruised everywhere with the sort of reckless enthusiasm that kept them both on their toes, sweeping aside breakables and covering sharp corners.
It never failed to amaze her just how naturally those simple things came to Leandro. He had embraced fatherhood. No one could accuse him of not putting his all into it. And by night he embraced the physical closeness that always left her wanting more of him. He was the very essence of what any woman would consider herself lucky to have ended up with. He was as amusing, intelligent and wildly, crazily sexy as he always had been, but scratch the surface and she knew that she wouldn’t find the love she desperately wanted.
Never, not once, not even in the heat of passion, had he uttered any unguarded words that could have led her to think that he had the sort of feelings for her that she had for him.
‘Want’ was a staple in his vocabulary but ‘love and need’ were ostensibly missing and, with each passing day, she wondered what would happen to them when their three months were up.
He never discussed it and neither did she. She was plagued by the suspicion that she was on trial, and cautious about how she responded, because she knew that what he wanted was a functioning business arrangement and not the sort of complicated emotional involvement that love brought with it.
Deep down she knew that if, at the end of the three-month period, he repeated that offer of marriage then she would accept. They got along, they were bonded in their love for Sam and the sex was mind-blowing. Many marriages worked quite happily on less.
Was she selling herself short? She didn’t think so because, whilst she had never envisaged being married to a guy who wasn’t madly in love with her, she also couldn’t imagine anyone else completing her the way he did.
She wondered whether he would get bored of her and feel tempted to stray but uneasily that was a bridge she was prepared to cross when she came to it.
‘Penny for them.’ Leandro scooped up his son, leant to brush a kiss on the side of her neck and then held Sam up high until he squealed with laughter, before handing him over to Abigail.
‘Just thinking about the move,’ she said brightly.
‘Sorry I won’t be able to come with you now,’ Leandro told her. ‘but I’ll be there later.’ He grinned. ‘You’ll probably get a lot more done without me around,’ he told her. ‘I would probably get under your feet. Or perhaps just under you.’
Abigail blushed bright red, reminded of just how much he thought about sex, practically to the exclusion of everything else aside from Sam and his work.
Determined not to dwell on what was missing in her life, but to focus on what she had, Abigail spent the drive to the cottage making lots of mental lists of what she would do and how she would apportion her time.
She had been out several times to see it, had supervised the arrangement of the various bits of furniture which had arrived over a period of three days, yet an hour later, when the four-wheel drive drew up in front of the cottage, she was charmed all over again.
The cottage had been upgraded to a very high standard, having been repainted, with new units put into the kitchen and landscaping done in the back garden, as well as hand-made, built-in furniture having been installed in the bedrooms. She and Sam explored the place. She had given the nanny a few days off so that she could accustom herself to the cottage, just Sam, Leandro and her, and as Leandro’s driver disappeared back to London Abigail felt the stirring of excitement at this new step in her life.
She allowed Sam to run around the sitting room, where there were no hard edges or glass, then she played with him in the garden and, by the time his afternoon nap time came at one-thirty, he was exhausted.
The kettle was boiling for a cup of tea when the doorbell went and her heart leapt at the prospect of Leandro being here much earlier than anticipated.
She dashed to the door, pulled it open and then fell back in surprise to see Cecilia standing on her doorstep, as stunningly gorgeous as she had been the last time they had seen one another. Both Leandro and his sister shared the same colouring, both olive-skinned with black hair and perfectly chiselled features. Where Leandro’s beauty was hard-edged and aggressively masculine, his sister’s was aristocratic and intensely feminine. She was the puma to Leandro’s tiger. Abigail associated pumas with cunning and danger, which was why she remained blocking the doorway.
‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ Cecilia peered past her and took a step forward. ‘Great place. I nabbed a peek at the particulars in Leandro’s apartment when I arrived a couple of hours ago but it’s even better in the flesh. I can see that you’ve really landed on your feet, Abigail. Must be nice for you, all things considered.’
‘Why are you here?’ Leandro hadn’t mentioned, not even in passing, that his sister was due back in the country today. Had that been a deliberate oversight on his part? Or had Cecilia descended on him without warning?
‘To catch up. Why else? I have driven all the way from London. The least you could do is invite me in for a glass of something.’
‘I thought you were in Fiji.’
‘Two weeks off. Thought I’d come and see my darling brother. In fact, I just left him with a few things to think about.’
Abigail stilled and she stood aside and quietly invited Cecilia in, guiding her immediately to the kitchen, while the other woman made a big show of looking around her and exclaiming with delight at everything she saw, from the pictures on the walls to the bottle-green range in the kitchen.
‘Hats off to you. You’ve done well. Bet you never thought you’d end up in a fancy cottage with a wad of cash to spend on yourself! Clever of you to get pregnant,’ she mused, glancing at her exquisitely manicured nails and buffing them with her thumb before fixing huge, almond-shaped eyes on her.
Abigail didn’t say anything, instead turning away and taking her time to make a pot of tea. Her heart was hammering and she knew, with a sickening feeling, that this conversation was going somewhere and the destination wasn’t going to be very nice.
But, now that the other woman was in the cottage, she had little option but to travel down the circuitous route of icy small talk laced with sugar-coated insults. She bit her tongue. There was no way that she was going to open up a can of worms by getting into an argument with Leandro’s sister.
