Samantha had spent many hours listening to her neighbour discuss her latest boyfriend or weep over a broken heart that would never be mended.
Right now, she simply had too much to do.
Too much homework from her eight-year-old charges to mark. Too many lessons to prepare. Too much red tape with Ofsted to get through. Not to mention the bank, who had been politely reminding her mother for the past three months that the mortgage hadn’t been paid.
But whoever was at the door wasn’t about to go away, not if the insistent finger on the button was anything to go by.
Sweeping the stack of exercise books off her lap and onto the little coffee table by the side of her chair and plunging her feet into her cosy bedroom slippers, she was working out which negative response, depending on who was at the door, she would be delivering so that her evening remained uninterrupted.
She yanked open the door and her mouth fell open. Literally. She stood there like a stranded goldfish, eyes like saucers, because the last person she ever, in a million years, had expected to see was standing in front of her.
Or rather lounging, his long, muscular body indolently leaning against the door frame, his hands thrust into the pockets of his black cashmere coat.
It had been several weeks since she had seen Leo Morgan-White.
He had nodded to her from across the width of his father’s massive drawing room, which had been crowded with at least three dozen locals, all friends from the village where his father and her mother lived. Harold was a popular member of the community and his annual Christmas party was something of an event on the local calendar.
She hadn’t even spoken to Leo that night. He’d been there with a leggy brunette who, in the depths of winter, had been wearing something very bright and very short, garnering attention from every single male in the room.
‘Have I come at a bad time?’
* * *
He’d taken the bait. Sly old fox that his father was, Leo had been persuaded into doing the unthinkable by the threat of ill health and a return of the depression that had dogged his father for years and from which he was only recently surfacing.
Of course, Harold genuinely and truly wanted Adele close to him and safe and, of course, he truly believed, and was probably spot on, that Gail would turn out to be a horrendous influence on her five-year-old granddaughter, but when he had pulled the ill-health-so-what’s-the-point-of-carrying-on? threat from the hat Leo had confessed himself to be beaten.
So here he was, two days later, with the soon-to-be object of his desire standing in front of him in some dull grey outfit and a pair of ridiculous, brightly coloured bedroom slippers.
‘Leo?’ Sammy blinked and wondered whether it was possible for stress to induce very realistic hallucinations. ‘What do you want? How did you find out where I live? What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Lots of questions, and I’ll answer them just as soon as you invite me in.’
Struck by a sudden thought, Sammy paled and stared up at him. ‘Has something happened? Is your dad all right?’ She was finding it very difficult to think but then the wretched man had always had that effect on her. Something about his devastatingly good looks. He was just so...so much larger than life.
Taller, more striking, with the rakish, swarthy sexiness of a pirate. Next to him, the rest of the male population always seemed to pale in comparison and, considering the long, long line of women he had run through over the years, she wasn’t the only one who thought so.
Unlike that long, long line of women, though, she knew better than to let all that drop-dead male sexiness get to her.
She still cringed in shame when she thought back to that awful incident years ago. She’d had gone along to a party at the big house, as everyone in the village called the Morgan-White mansion up on the hill.
The place had been teeming with people. It had been a birthday bash for Leo and half the world seemed to be there. Heaven only knew why she’d been invited but she imagined that it had been something of a pity invite and, whilst she had cringed at the thought of going, she had been encouraged by the fact that several of the locals had also been on the guest list so she wouldn’t be a complete fish out of water. She’d spent ages choosing just the right dress. She’d only spotted him from a distance later, when she had been standing in the garden and, miracle of miracles, he had shown up right next to her and they had chatted for what had seemed like ages. He’d torn himself away from his gilded crowd and Sammy had been on cloud nine until, late in the evening, a very tall, very blonde girl had broken free from the group and confronted her just outside the marquee which had been erected in the garden.
‘You’re making a bloody fool of yourself,’ she’d hissed, words slurring from too much free champagne. ‘Can’t you see that Leo is never, and I mean never, going to give you the time of day? You may have grown up next to him but you’re poor, you’re fat and you’re boring. You’re making a laughing stock of yourself.’
Her infatuation had died fast. Since then, watching off and on from the sidelines, she had come to see just how repulsive his approach to women was. He picked them up and then, when he’d got what he wanted and boredom began setting in, he dumped them without a backward glance and moved on.
Romantic at heart, with a core of firmly held family values, Sammy marvelled that she could ever have looked twice at someone like Leo. But, then again, she’d been young and he’d been crazily good-looking.
‘He’s been better. Are you going to invite me in or are we going to have this conversation here?’
‘I suppose you can come in.’
* * *
Great start, Leo thought wryly. A very auspicious beginning to what’s intended to be the relationship of a lifetime.
He hadn’t thought about how she was going to react to his proposition but he didn’t expect too much protesting. He was, after all, bringing a great deal of money to the table and, as everyone knew, money talked a lot louder than words.
Anne Wilson, Samantha’s mother, was a close friend of his father’s and had been since Leo’s mother had fallen ill and Anne, a nurse at the local hospital, had gone beyond the call of duty to help out. Their bond had strengthened over the years as she had proved to be a solid rock upon whom his father had often leaned, particularly after his acrimonious divorce from Georgia.
It was no surprise then that Anne had confided in Harold about her ill health and the money problems she was having with the bank because she had been forced to quit her job. Though Harold had offered to give her the money, and, when that hadn’t worked, to lend it to her, she had refused.
* * *
‘So...’ Sammy folded her arms and stared at him almost before he had shut the door behind him. ‘What have you come here for?’ He was so good-looking that she could barely look at him without blushing.
Leo’s fabulous looks had to do with far more than just the arrangement of his features. Yes, he was indecently perfect, from the long, dark, thick lashes that shielded equally dark eyes and the straight, arrogant nose to the sensuous curve of his mouth. Yes, he had the toned, lean, six-foot-two-inch frame of an athlete and the lazy grace of some kind of predatory jungle animal, but he also generated an impression of power that was frankly mesmerising.
‘Are you always so welcoming to visitors?’ Leo drawled, ignoring her bristling hostility to shrug off his coat, which he proceeded to dump on the coat hook by the front door.
The house had clearly been made into flats, each with a separate entrance and, from the looks of it, on the cheap. Too much door-slamming and the whole structure would collapse like a house of cards.
‘I happen to be very busy at the moment,’ Sammy said shortly. She led the way into the sitting room and gestured to the mound of exercise books which she had been about to look at.
He