Deal With The Devil: Secrets of a Ruthless Tycoon / The Most Expensive Lie of All / The Magnate's Manifesto

‘You never said...’ Brianna begin heading up the stairs, carrying as much with her as she could: files, her jeans and her trainers, which she didn’t bother to stick on completely.

Behind her, Leo scooped up the remainder of the files and began following her.

‘Never said what?’

‘All those women you’re so cynical about...’ She paused to look at him over her shoulder. ‘The ones who wear lacy underwear...’

‘Did I ever say that? I don’t recall.’

‘You didn’t have to. I can read between the lines.’ She spun back round and headed towards her suite of rooms, straight to the study, where she dumped all the files she had been carrying. She stood back and watched as he deposited the remainder of them, including her computer, which was as heavy as a barrow full of bricks, and—yes, he was right—in desperate need of updating.

Brianna took in his guarded, shuttered expression and knew instinctively that she was treading on quicksand, even though he hadn’t rushed in with any angry words telling her to mind her own business. She could see it on his face. Her heart was beating so fiercely that she could almost hear it in the still quiet of the room.

‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she mumbled, backing out of the little office. ‘On my own, if you don’t mind.’

Leo frowned and raked his fingers through his hair, but he didn’t move a muscle.

She wanted to talk. Talk about what? His exes? What was the point of that? When it came to women and meaningful conversations, they invariably led down the same road: a dead end. He wasn’t entirely sure where his aversion to commitment came from and he knew, if he were honest, that his parents would have wanted to see him travel down the traditional route of marriage and kids by thirty—but there it was; he hadn’t. He had never felt the inclination. Perhaps a feeling of security was something that developed in a mother’s womb and having been given up for adoption, by definition, had wiped that out and the security of making money, something tangible he could control, had taken its place.

At any rate, the minute any woman started showing signs of crossing the barriers he had firmly erected around himself, they were relegated to history.

He told himself that there should be no difficulty in this particular relationship following the same course because he could see, from the look in her eyes, that whatever chat she wanted to have was not going to begin and end with the choice of underwear his women were accustomed to wearing.

He told himself that in fact it would be easier to end this relationship because, in essence, it had never really functioned in his real life. It had functioned as something sweet and satisfying within a bubble. And within a day or two, once he had met his birth mother and put any unanswered questions to rest, he would be gone.

So there definitely was no point to a lengthy heart-to-,heart. He strolled into the bedroom and glanced down at the snow which was already beginning to thaw.

She emerged minutes later from the shower with a towel wrapped round her, her long hair piled up on top of her head and held in place with a hair grip. Tendrils had escaped and framed her heart-shaped face. She looked impossibly young and vulnerable.

‘What are you doing in my bedroom?’

‘Okay. So I go out with women who seem to spend a lot of money on fancy underwear.’ He glowered at her. ‘I don’t know what that has to do with anything.’ He watched as she rummaged in her drawers in silence and fetched out some faded jogging bottoms and a rugby-style jumper, likewise faded.

Brianna knew that a few passing remarks had escalated into something that she found unsettling. She didn’t want to pry into his life. She wanted to be the adult who took this on board, no questions asked and no strings attached. Unfortunately...

She disappeared back into the bathroom, changed and returned to find him still standing in an attitude of challenging defensiveness by the bedroom window.

‘You wanted to talk...’ he prompted, in defiance of common sense. ‘Are you jealous that I’ve had lovers? That they’ve been the sort of women who—?’

‘Don’t run pubs, live on a shoestring and wear functional underwear from department stores? No, I’m not jealous. Why would I be?’

‘Good. Because, personally, I don’t do jealousy.’ It occurred to Leo that there were a number of things he didn’t do when it came to his personal relationships and yet, here he was, doing one of them right now: having a talk.

‘Have we ended up in bed because you think I make a change?’ She took a deep breath and looked him squarely in the face. He was so beautiful. He literally took her breath away. ‘From all those women you went out with?’ If she found him beautiful, if he blew her mind away, then why wouldn’t he have had the same effect on hordes of other women?

‘No! That’s an absurd question.’

‘Is it?’ She turned on her heel and began back down the stairs to the bar area where she proceeded to do some unnecessary tidying. He lounged against the bar, hands in his pockets, and watched her as she worked. She appeared to be in no hurry to proceed with the conversation she had initiated. The longer the silence stretched between them, the more disgruntled Leo became.

Moving to stand directly in front of her, so that she was forced to stop arranging the beer mats in straight lines on the counter, he said, ‘If there’s any comparison to be done, then you win hands down.’

Brianna felt a stupid surge of pleasure. ‘I’m guessing you would say that, considering we’re sleeping together and you’re pretty much stuck here.’

‘Am I? The snow seems to be on its way out.’ They weren’t touching each other, but he could feel her as forcibly as if they had been lying naked on her bed.

‘How long do you intend to stay?’ She flushed and glanced down at her feet before taking a deep breath and looking at him without flinching. ‘I’m going to keep the pub closed for another fortnight but just in case, er, bookings come in for the rooms, it would be helpful for me to know when yours might be free to, er, rent out...’

And this, Leo thought, was the perfect opportunity to put a date in the calendar. It was as obvious as the nose on his face that her reason for wanting to find out when he would be leaving had nothing to do with a possible mystery surge in bookings for the rooms. He didn’t like being put in a position of feeling trapped.

‘I told you I’d stick around, make sure you didn’t get ripped off or taken advantage of by this so-called best buddy of yours,’ he said roughly. ‘I won’t be going anywhere until I’m satisfied that you’re okay on that score. Satisfied? No; you’re not. What else is on your mind, Brianna? Spit it out and then I can disappear for a shower and some work and leave you to get on with your female bonding in peace.’

Brianna shrugged. Everything about his body language suggested that he was in no mood to stand here, answering questions. Perhaps, she thought, answering questions was something else he didn’t do when it came to women. Like jealousy. And yet he wasn’t moving. ‘Did you end up here on the back of a bad relationship?’ she asked bluntly. She shot him a defiant look from under her lashes. ‘I know you don’t want me to ask lots of questions...’

‘Did I ever say that?’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘Because, let me guess, you seem to have a hot line to my thoughts!’ He scowled. Far from backing away from an interrogation he didn’t want and certainly didn’t need, his feet appeared to be disobeying the express orders of his brain. Against all odds, he wanted to wipe that defensive, guarded expression from her face. ‘And no, I did not end up here on the back of a bad relationship.’ He had ended up here because...

Leo flushed darkly, uncomfortable with where his thoughts were drifting.

‘I’m sleeping with you, and I know it’s going to end soon, but I still want to know that you’re not using me as some sort of sticking plaster while you try to recover from a broken heart.’

‘I’ve never suffered from a broken heart, Brianna.’ Leo smiled crookedly at her and stroked the side of her face with his finger.

Just then her mobile buzzed and after only a few seconds on the phone she said to him, ‘Bridget’s had her final check-up with the consultant and they’re going to be setting off in about half an hour. They’ll probably be here in about an hour and a half or so. Depends on the roads, but the main roads will all be gritted. It’s only the country lanes around here that are still a little snowed up.’

An hour and a half. Leo’s lips thinned but, despite the impending meeting with his mother, one which he had quietly anticipated for a number of years ever since he had tracked down her whereabouts, his focus remained exclusively on the girl standing in front of him.

‘Everyone has suffered from a broken heart at some point.’ She reverted to her original topic.

‘I’m the exception to the rule.’

‘You’ve never been in love?’

‘You say that as though it’s inconceivable. No. Never. And stop looking at me as though I’ve suddenly turned into an alien life-form. Are you telling me that, after your experience with the guy you thought you would be spending your life with, you’re still glad to have been in love?’

He lounged against the bar and stared down at her. He had become so accustomed to wearing jeans and an assortment of her father’s old plaid flannel shirts, a vast array of which she seemed to have kept, that he idly wondered what it would feel like returning to his snappy handmade suits, his Italian shoes, the silk ties, driving one of his three cars or having Harry chauffeur him. He would return to the reality of high-powered meetings, life in the fast lane, private planes and first-class travel to all four corners of the globe.

Here, he could be a million miles away, living on another planet. Was that why he now found himself inclined to have this type of conversation? The sort of touchy-feely conversation that he had always made a point of steering well clear from? Really, since when had he ever been into probing any woman about her thoughts and feelings about past loves?

‘Of course I am,’ Brianna exclaimed stoutly. ‘It may have crashed and burned, but there were moments of real happiness.’

Leo frowned. Real happiness? What did she mean by that? Good sex? He didn’t care much for a trip down happiness lane with her. If she felt inclined to reminisce over the good old days, conveniently forgetting the misery that had been dished up to her in the end, then he was not the man with the listening ear.

‘How salutary that you can ignore the fact that you were taken for a ride for years... Are you still in touch with the creep?’

Brianna frowned and tried to remember what the creep looked like. ‘No,’ she said honestly. ‘I haven’t got a clue what he’s up to. The last I heard from one of my friends from uni, he had gone abroad to work for some important law firm in New York. He’s disappeared completely. I was heartbroken at the time, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not glad I met him, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t hope to meet that someone special at some point in the future.’

And as she said that a very clear picture of Mr Special floated into her mind. He was approximately six-two with bronzed skin, nearly black hair and lazy, midnight-dark eyes that could send shivers racing up and down her spine. He came in a package that had carried very clear health warnings but still she had fallen for him like a stupid teenager with more hormones than common sense.

Fallen in lust with him, she thought with feverish panic. She hadn’t had a relationship with a guy for years! And then he had come along, drop-dead gorgeous, with all the seductive anonymity of a stranger—a writer, no less. Was it any wonder that she had fallen in lust with him?

Was that why she could now feel herself becoming clingy? Not wanting him to go? Losing all sense of perspective?

‘And no one special is on the scene here?’ Leo drawled lazily. ‘Surely the lads must be queuing up for you...’

Of course there had been nibbles, but Brianna had never been interested. She had reasoned to herself that she just didn’t have the time; that her big, broken love affair had irreparably damaged something inside her; that, just as soon as the pub really began paying its way, she would jump back into the dating world.

All lies. She could have had all the time in the world, a fully paid-up functioning heart and a pub that turned over a million pounds a year in profit and she still wouldn’t have been drawn to anyone—because she had been waiting for just the moment when Leo Spencer walked through the door, tall, dark and dangerous, like a gunslinger in a Western movie.

‘I’m not interested in anything serious at the moment,’ she said faintly. ‘I have loads of time. Bridget should be arriving any minute now.’

‘At least an hour left to go...’ How was it possible to shove all thoughts of his so-called mother out of his head? He had almost forgotten that the woman was on her way.

‘I need to go and get her room ready.’

‘Haven’t you already done that? The potpourri and the new throw from the jack-of-all-trades supermarket?’

She had. But suddenly she wanted nothing more than to escape his suffocating masculine presence, find a spot where she could straighten out her tangled thoughts.

‘Well, I want to make sure that it’s just right,’ she said sharply.

Leo stepped aside. ‘And I think I’ll go and have a shower and do something productive with my time in my room.’

‘You don’t have to disappear! You’re a paying guest, Leo. You can come down and do your writing in your usual place. Bridget and I won’t make any noise at all. She’ll probably just want to rest.’

‘I’ll let the two of you do your bonding in peace,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll come down for dinner. I take it you’ll be cooking for three?’

‘You know I will, and please don’t start on the business of me being a mug.’

Leo held up both hands in a gesture of mock-indignation that she could even contemplate such a thing.

Brianna shot him a reluctant smile. ‘You wait and see. You’ll end up loving her as much as I do.’

‘Yes. We’ll certainly wait and see,’ Leo delivered with a coolness that Brianna felt rather than saw, because his expression was mildly amused. She wondered if she had perhaps imagined it.

Leo remained where he was while she disappeared upstairs to do her last check of the bedroom where Bridget would be staying, doubtless making sure that the sheets were in place with hospital precision, corners tucked in just so.

His mouth curled with derision. The thought of her being taken advantage of filled him with disgust. The thought of her putting her trust in a woman who would inevitably turn out not to be the person she thought she was made his stomach turn. He could think of no other woman whose trusting nature should be allowed to remain intact.

He slammed his clenched fist against the wall and gritted his teeth. He had come here predisposed to dislike the woman who had given birth to him and then given him away. He was even more predisposed to dislike her as the woman who, in the final analysis, would reveal her true colours to the girl who had had the kindness to take her under her wing.

The force of his feelings on this subject surprised him. It was like the powerful impact of a depth charge, rumbling down deep in the very core of him.

He didn’t wait for the ambulance bearing his destiny towards him to arrive, instead pushing himself away from the wall and heading up to his bedroom. His focus on work had been alarmingly casual and now, having had a shower, he buried himself in reports, numbers, figures and all the things that usually had the ability to fully engage his attention.

Not now. His brain refused to obey the commands being issued to it. What would the woman look like? Years ago, he could have had pictures taken of her when he had set his man on her trail, but he hadn’t bothered because she had been just a missing slot in his life he had wanted to fill. He hadn’t given a damn what she looked like. Now, he had to fight the temptation to stroll over to the window and peer out to the courtyard which his room overlooked.

He stiffened when he eventually heard the sound of the ambulance pulling up and the muffled rise and fall of voices which carried up to his room.

Deliberately he tuned out and exerted every ounce of will power to rein in his exasperating, wandering mind.

* * *

At a little after five, he got a text from Brianna: a light early supper would be served at six. If he wanted to join them, then he was more than welcome. Sorry she couldn’t come up to his room but she had barely had time to draw breath since Bridget had arrived.

She had concluded her text with a smiley face. Who did that? He smiled and texted back: yes, he’d be down promptly at six.

He sat back and stared at the wall. In an hour he would meet his past. He would put that to bed and then, when that was done, he would move on, back to the life from which he had taken this brief respite.

He had an image of Brianna’s face gazing at him, of her lithe, slim body, of the way she had of humming under her breath when she was occupied doing something, and the way she looked when she was curled up on the sofa trying to make sense of her accounts.

But of course, he thought grimly, that was fine. Sure, she would be on his mind. They might not have spent a long time in each other’s company but it had been concentrated time. Plenty long enough for images of her to get stuck in his head.

But she was not part of his reality. He would check out the woman who had given birth to him, put his curiosity to bed and, yes, move on...

CHAPTER SIX

LEO WASN’T QUITE sure when the snow had stopped, when the furious blizzards had turned to tamer snowfall, and when that tamer snowfall had given way to a fine, steady drizzle that wiped clean the white horizon and returned it to its original, snow-free state.

He couldn’t quite believe that he was still here. Of course, he returned to London sporadically mid-week and was uncomfortably aware of his conscience every time he vaguely intimated that there were things to do with the job he had ditched: paperwork that needed sorting out; problems with his accommodation that needed seeing to; social engagements that had to be fulfilled because he should have returned to London by now.

The lie he had blithely concocted before his game plan had been derailed did not sit quite so easily now. But what the hell was he to do?

He rose to move towards the window and stared distractedly down at the open fields that backed the pub. It was nearly three. In three hours, the pub would be alive with the usual Friday evening crowd, most of whom he knew by sight if not by name.

How had something so straightforward become so tangled in grey areas?

Of course, he knew. In fact, he could track the path as clearly as if it was signposted. His simple plan—go in, confirm all the suspicions he had harboured about his birth mother, close the book and leave—had slipped out of place the second he had been confronted with Brianna.

She was everything the women he had dated in the past were not. Was that why he had not been able to kill his ill-advised temptation to take her to bed? And had her natural, open personality, once sampled, become an addiction he found impossible to jettison? He couldn’t seem to see her without wanting her. She turned him on in ways that were unimaginable. For once in his life, he experienced a complete loss of self-control when they made love; it was a drug too powerful to resist.

And then...his mother. The woman he had prejudged, had seen as no more than a distasteful curiosity that had to be boxed and filed away, had not slotted neatly into the box he had prepared.

With a sigh, he raked his fingers through his hair and glanced over his shoulder to the reports blinking at him, demanding urgent attention, yet failing to focus it.

He thought back to when he had met her, that very first impression: smaller than he’d imagined, clearly younger, although her face was worn, very frail after hospital. He had expected someone brash, someone who fitted the image of a woman willing to give away a baby. He had realised, after only an hour in her company, that his preconceived notions were simplistic. That was an eventuality he had not taken into account. He lived his life with clean lines, no room for all those grey areas that could turn stark reality into a sludgy mess. But he had heard her gentle voice and, hard as he had tried not to be swayed, he had found himself hovering on the brink of needing to know more before he made his final judgement.

Not that anything she had said had been of any importance. The three of them had sat on that first evening and had dinner while Brianna had fussed and clucked and his mother had smiled with warm sympathy and complained about her garden and the winter vegetables which would sadly be suffering from negligence.

She had asked him about himself. He had looked at her and wondered where his dark eyes and colouring came from. She was slight and blonde with green eyes. At one point, she had murmured with a faraway expression that he reminded her of someone, someone she used to know, but he had killed that tangent and moved the conversation along.

Seeing her, meeting her, had made him feel weird, confused, uncomfortable in his own skin. A thousand questions had reared their ugly heads and he had killed them all by grimly holding on to his anger. But underneath that anger he had known only too well that the foundations on which he had relied were beginning to feel shaky. He had no longer known what he should be feeling.

Since that first day, he had seen her, though, only in brief interludes and always with Brianna around. Much of the time she spent in her bedroom. She was an avid reader. He had had to reacquaint himself with literature in an attempt to keep his so-called writer occupation as credible as possible. He had caught himself wondering what books she enjoyed reading.

On his last trip to London, he had brought with him a stack of books and had been surprised to discover that, after a diet of work-related reading, the fiction and non-fiction he had begun delving into had not been the hard work he had expected. And at least he could make a halfway decent job of sounding articulate on matters non-financial.

Where this was going to lead, he had no idea.

He headed downstairs and pulled up short at the sight of Bridget sitting in the small lounge set aside from the bar area, which Brianna had turned into her private place if she didn’t want to remain in her bedroom.

Because of Bridget, the pub now had slightly restricted opening and closing hours. He assumed that that was something that could only be achieved in a small town where all the regulars knew what was going on and would not be motivated to take their trade elsewhere—something that would have been quite tedious, as ‘elsewhere’ was not exactly conveniently located to get to by foot or on a bike.

‘Leo!’

Leo paused, suddenly indecisive at being confronted by his mother without Brianna around as an intermediary. She was sitting by the large bay window that overlooked the back garden and the fields behind the pub. Her fair hair was tied back and the thin, gaunt lines of her face were accentuated so that she resembled a wraith.

‘Brianna’s still out.’ She patted the chair facing hers and motioned to him to join her. ‘We haven’t chatted very much at all. Why don’t you have a cup of tea with me?’

Leo frowned, exasperated at his inability to take control of the situation. Did he want to talk to his mother on a one-to-one basis? Why did he suddenly feel so...vulnerable and at odds with himself at the prospect? Wasn’t this why he had descended on this back-of-nowhere town in the first place? So things had not turned out quite as he had anticipated, but wasn’t it still on his agenda to find out what the woman was like?