has said that to me in the past I’m guaranteed to dislike the person in question.’ For the first time, he thought of his birth mother in a way that wasn’t exclusively abstract, wasn’t merely a jigsaw piece that had to be located and slotted in for the completed picture.
What did she look like? Tall, short, fat, thin...? And from whom had he inherited his non-Irish looks? His adoptive parents had both been small, neat and fair-haired. He had towered above them, dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned...as physically different from them as chalk from cheese.
He stamped down his surge of curiosity and reminded himself that he wasn’t here to form any kind of relationship with the woman but merely finally to lay an uncertain past to rest. Anger, curiosity and confusion were unhappy life companions and the faster he dispensed with them, the better.
‘You’re very suspicious, Leo.’ Brianna thought back to his vehement declaration that women couldn’t be trusted when it came to contraception. ‘Everyone loves Bridget.’
‘You mentioned that she didn’t have a...partner.’ A passing remark on which Brianna had not elaborated. Now, Leo was determined to prise as much information out of her as he could, information that would be a useful backdrop for when he met the woman the following day. It was a given, he recognised, that some people might think him heartless to extract information from the woman he was sleeping with, but he decided to view that as a necessity—something that couldn’t be helped, something to be completely disassociated from the fact that they were lovers, and extremely passionate lovers at that.
Life, generally speaking, was all about people using people. If he hadn’t learned that directly from his adoptive parents, then he certainly must have had it cemented somewhere deep within his consciousness. Perhaps, and in spite of his remarkably stable background, the fact that he was adopted had allowed a seed of cynicism to run rampant over the years.
‘She doesn’t talk much about that.’
‘No? Why not? You’re her...what would you say...confidante? I would have thought that she would find it a comfort to talk to you about whatever happened. I mean, you’ve known each other how long? Were your parents friends with the woman?’
Brianna laughed. ‘Oh, gosh, no!’ She glanced round the kitchen, making sure that all her jobs were done. ‘Bridget is a relative newcomer to this area.’
‘Really...’ Leo murmured. ‘I was under the impression that she was a valued, long-standing member of the community.’ He almost laughed at the thought of that. Valued member of the community? Whilst jettisoning an unwanted child like an item of disposable garbage? Only in a community of jailbirds would someone like that have been up for consideration as a valued member.
‘But now you tell me that she’s a newcomer. How long has she been living in the area?’
‘Eight years tops.’
‘And before that?’
Brianna shot him a look of mild curiosity but, when he smiled that smile at her, that crooked, sexy half-smile, she felt any niggling questions hovering on the tip of her tongue disappear.
‘You’re asking a lot of questions,’ she murmured breathlessly. He signalled for her to come closer and she did, until he could wrap his arms around her and hold her close.
‘Like I said, I have a curious mind.’ He breathed in the clean floral scent of her hair and for a few seconds forgot everything. ‘You shouldn’t have put your jumper back on,’ he remarked in a voice that thrilled her to the core. ‘I like looking at your breasts. Just the perfect mouthful...’
‘And I have calls to make if I’m to keep the pub shut!’ She slapped away his wandering hand, even though she would have liked nothing more than to drag him up to the bedroom to lay claim to him. ‘And you have a book to work on!’
‘I’d rather work on you...’
‘Thank goodness Bridget isn’t here. She’d be horrified.’
Leo nearly burst out laughing. ‘And is this because she’s the soul of prurience? You still haven’t told me where she came from. Maybe she was a nun in her former life?’ He began strolling out of the kitchen towards the sitting room with the open fire which he had requisitioned as his working space. His computer was shut and there was a stack of novels by the side of it, books he had picked from her collection. He had already started two, abandoned them both and was reaching the conclusion that soul-searching novels with complicated themes were not for him.
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’ Brianna hovered by the table as he sat down. She knew that he demanded complete privacy when he was writing, sectioning off a corner of the sitting area, his back to the window. Yet somehow it felt as though their conversation was not quite at an end, even though he wasn’t asking any further questions.
‘Was I?’
His cool, dark eyes rested on her and she flushed and traced an invisible pattern with her finger on the table. Was there something she was missing? Some important link she was failing to connect?
‘You’ve known this woman for a few years...’
‘Nearly seven. She came to the pub one evening on her own.’
‘In other words, she has a drinking habit?’
‘No! She’d moved to the area and she thought it might be a way of meeting people! We have quiz nights here once a month. She used to come for the quiz nights, and after a while we got chatting.’
‘Chatting about where she had come from? Oh no; of course, you know nothing about that. And I’m guessing not many clues as to what she was doing here either? It’s a small place for a woman who wants to meet people...’
‘It’s a community. We make outsiders feel welcome.’ She blushed at her unwitting choice of words. ‘I felt sorry for her,’ Brianna continued hurriedly. ‘I started an over-forties’ quiz night, ladies only, so that she could get talking to some of them.’
Leo was mentally joining the dots and was arriving at a picture not dissimilar to the one he had always had of the woman who had given birth to him—with a few extra trimmings thrown in for good measure.
A new life and a new start for someone with a dubious past to conceal. Tellingly, no one knew about this past life, including the girl who had supposedly become her anchor in the community.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that, where there were secrets that required concealment, those secrets were dirty little ones. He had received half a picture from Brianna, he was certain of it—the rosy half, the half that didn’t conform to his expectations.
‘And you did all this without having a clue as to this woman’s past?’
‘I don’t need to know every single detail about someone’s past to recognise a good person when I see one!’ She folded her arms tightly around her and glared down at him. She should have let him carry on with his writing. Instead, she had somehow found herself embroiled in an argument she hadn’t courted and was dismayed at how sick it made her feel. ‘I don’t want to argue with you about this, Leo.’
‘You’re young. You’re generous and trusting. You’re about to give house room to someone whose past is a mystery.’ He drew an uneasy parallel with his own circumstance, here at the pub under a very dubious cloud of deceit indeed, and dismissed any similarities. He was, after all, as upstanding and law-abiding as they came. No shady past here.
On the very point of tipping over into anger that he was in the process of dismissing her as the sort of gullible fool who might be taken in by someone who was up to no good, another thought lodged in the back of her mind. It took up residence next to the pernicious feel-good seed that had been planted when she had considered the possibility that he might not be welcoming Bridget because he cherished their one-to-one solitude.
Was he seriously worried about her? And if he was... That thought joined the other links in the chain that seemed to represent the nebulous beginnings