at the prospect. He was a highly sexual man with a very energetic libido, but recently, beautiful and obliging women who were always willing to go the extra mile for him had left him dissatisfied.
His palate was jaded.
Perhaps now was a very good time to indulge in a fake engagement with a woman he had precisely nothing in common with. A couple of months pretending to be in love with someone who didn’t stand a chance of rousing his interest might be just the ticket. He would resume life with renewed vigour and things would be back to normal. And a bout of celibacy never killed anyone.
‘Which—’ he brought the conversation neatly back to the point at hand ‘—brings us back to the problem. I don’t, according to my father, make a credible guardian with my reputation, and I will be under scrutiny because I will be travelling to Melbourne to sort this situation out. Eyes will be on me. I need credibility—and here is where you come in. I need a fiancée to show my stability to the Melbourne courts and he’s suggested that you would be perfect for the part.’
Sammy stared at him. So that was what all of this was about. The ring. The proposal. It was so preposterous that she was torn between bursting into manic laughter and propelling him out of her flat.
She did neither. Instead, she said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, right?’
‘As I’ve already told you, I have better things to do than show up here for a laugh. This is no joke, Samantha.’ He leaned forward and looked at her with utter seriousness. ‘My father refuses to accept that he may never see Adele. The fact that Sean was his stepson for a short period of time rather than his own flesh and blood and that any tenuous family connection they might have once had ended when he and Georgia divorced makes not a scrap of difference to him, but then he’s that kind of man, as I expect you already know. He sees this as his last chance to do something about the situation and he can’t understand any hesitancy on my part to leap aboard the plan.’
‘I’m not going to go with you to the other side of the world so that I can pretend to be your fiancée, Leo!’ Agitated, Sammy leapt to her feet and began pacing the room. Her thoughts were all over the place and her body was burning.
‘Why would you want me to be your fake fiancée, anyway?’ She spun round to look at him, hands on hips. ‘Why don’t you just pick one of those women from your little black book? You have enough to choose from! Every time I open a tabloid I seem to see you somewhere in the gossip columns with a glamour model hanging on to you for dear life.’
Leo’s eyebrows shot up and he gave her a slow, curling smile. ‘Follow me in the tabloids, do you?’
‘Trust you to put that spin on it,’ Sammy muttered under her breath, which seemed to amuse him further. ‘I won’t do it,’ she said flatly. ‘You can have your pick of any woman you want so go ahead and pick one of them.’
‘But none of them will do,’ Leo said smoothly and Sammy paused to frown.
‘Why not?’
He looked at her for a long while in perfect silence and it didn’t take her long to get the message.
‘Too glamorous,’ Sammy said slowly, while she pointlessly wished the ground would open and swallow her, disgorging her somewhere on the other side of the world. ‘You need someone plain and average, someone who would give the right image of a responsible other half, able to take on a young child.’
Accustomed to telling it like it was, Leo had the grace to flush. ‘The women I date would be inappropriate—’ he smoothed over the unvarnished bluntness of her statement ‘—it has nothing to do with looks.’
‘It has everything to do with looks,’ Sammy retorted, her voice shaking. ‘I want you to leave. Right now. I’d love to be able to help your father but I draw the line at being manipulated into playing the part of your dreary fiancée so that you can try and fool the authorities in Australia into believing that you’re a halfway decent guy with a few responsible bones in his body!’
Leo was outraged at the barrage of insults contained in that outburst. Halfway decent guy? A few responsible bones?
He stayed right where he was, a solid mass of sheer physical strength. He wasn’t going anywhere and she would be more than welcome to try and budge him if she wanted. She wouldn’t get far.
‘Leave!’ she snapped.
‘Sit,’ he returned.
‘How dare you come into my house and...and...?’
‘I’m not done with this conversation.’ Leo looked at her steadily and she gritted her teeth in impotent fury.
There was no way she could force him out. He was way too big and far too strong. And he knew it.
‘There’s nothing else to say,’ she told him in a frozen voice. ‘There’s no way you could persuade me to go along with your scheme.’ Those cruelly delivered words from when she was a teenager had rushed back towards her with the force of a freight train. As an awkward, self-conscious adolescent she hadn’t been his type and as a twenty-six-year-old woman she still wasn’t his type...
She didn’t care because, as it happened, he was no more her type than she was his, but it still hurt to have it shoved down her throat.
‘Sure about that?’
Sammy didn’t bother to answer. Her arms were still folded, her face was still a mask of resentment, her legs were still squarely apart as she continued to stare down at him.
He couldn’t have looked more relaxed.
She marvelled how someone who adored his father so much could actually be so odious, but then he was a high-flying businessman with no morals to speak of when it came to women so why was she surprised?
‘One hundred per cent sure,’ she threw at him.
‘Because I haven’t just popped along here to ask a favour without bringing something to the table...’
‘I don’t see what you could possibly bring to the table that could be of any interest to me.’
‘I like the moral high ground,’ he murmured in a voice that left her in no doubt that the moral high ground was the very last thing he liked. ‘But, in my experience, moral high grounds usually have their foundations built on sand. Why don’t you sit down and finish hearing me out? If, at the end of what I have to say, you’re still adamant that you want no part of this arrangement, then so be it. My father will be bitterly disappointed, but that’s life. He won’t be able to accuse me of not trying.’
Sammy hesitated. He wasn’t going anywhere. The wretched man was going to stay put until he had said what he had come to say—the whole speech and nothing but the whole speech.
Why waste time arguing?
She perched on the edge of the chair and waited for him to continue.
He was truly a beautiful human being, she thought. All raven-black hair and piercing black eyes and fantastically chiselled features. It was hardly the time to be thinking this, but she just couldn’t help herself.
Was it any wonder that there weren’t many women between the ages of twenty-one and ninety-one who wouldn’t have crashed into a lamp post to grab a second look?
She tried to imagine one of those women he dated trying to pass herself off as a suitable bride-to-be and, whilst it certainly worked from the gorgeous couple aspect, the whole thing fell apart the second a little girl was put in the equation.
‘Your mother hasn’t been well,’ Leo said quietly. ‘I’m sorry that this is the first time I’ve...commiserated.’
‘She’s going to be fine.’ Sammy tilted her chin at an angle but, as always when she thought about her mother, the tears were never very far away.
‘Yes. I’ve been told the chemotherapy has been successful and that the tumour has shrunk considerably. You must be relieved.’