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‘Who?’
‘It might help if I told you a little bit about myself, Brianna.’
‘You mean aside from the lies you’ve already told me?’
‘The lies were necessary, or at least it seemed so at the time.’
‘Lies are never necessary.’
‘And that’s a point we can possibly debate at a later date. For now, let me start by telling you that I was adopted at birth. It’s nothing that is a state secret, but the reason I came to Ballybay is because I traced my birth mother a few years ago and I concluded that finding her was something I had to do. Not while my adoptive parents were still alive. I loved them very much; I would never have wanted to hurt them in any way.’
Brianna stared at him open-mouthed. It felt as though the connections in her brain were all backfiring so that nothing made sense any more. What on earth was he going on about? And how could he just sit there as though this was the most normal conversation in the world?
‘You’re adopted?’ was all she could say weakly, because she just couldn’t seem to join the dots in the conversation.
‘I grew up in leafy, affluent suburbia, the only child of a couple who couldn’t have children of their own. I knew from the beginning that I was adopted, and it has to be said that they gave me the sort of upbringing that most kids could only dream about.’
‘But you didn’t want to find your real mother until now?’
‘Real mother is not a term I would use. And finding her would not have been appropriate had my adoptive parents still been alive. Like I said, I owe everything to them, and they would have been hurt had I announced that I was off on a journey of discovery.’
‘But they’re no longer alive. And so you decided to trace your...your...’
‘I’ve had the information on the woman for years, Brianna. I simply bided my time.’
Brianna stared at him. He’d simply bided his time? There was something so deliberate and so controlled about that simple statement that her head reeled.
‘And...and...you came to Ballybay and pretended to be someone you weren’t because...?
‘Because it was smaller than I imagined,’ he confessed truthfully. ‘And I wanted to find out about the woman before I passed judgement.’
‘You mean if you had announced yourself and told everyone why you were there...what? Your mother—sorry, your birth mother—would have tried to...to what?’ She looked around her at the staggering, shameless testimony to his well-heeled life and then settled her eyes back on him. ‘Did you think that you needed to keep your real identity a secret because if she knew how rich you were she would have tried to latch on to your money?’
Leo made an awkward, dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘I don’t allow people to latch on to my money,’ he said flatly. ‘No, I kept my identity a secret, as indeed my purpose in being there in the first place, because I wasn’t sure what I would do with the information I gathered.’
‘How can you talk about this with such a lack of emotion? I feel as though I’m seeing a stranger.’
Leo sat back and raked his fingers through his hair. He was being honest. In fact, he was sparing no detail when it came to telling the truth, yet he still felt like the guy wrecking Christmas by taking a gun to Santa Claus.
‘A stranger you’ve made love to countless times,’ he couldn’t help but murmur in a driven undertone that belied his cool exterior. He took a deep breath and tried to fight the intrusive memory of his hands over her smooth, slender body, tracing the light sprinkling of freckles on her collarbone, the circular discs of her nipples and the soft, downy hair between her legs. She was the most naturally, openly responsive lover he had ever had. When he parted her legs to cup the moisture between them, he felt her responding one-hundred per cent to his touch. She didn’t play games. She hadn’t hidden how he had made her feel.
‘And I wish I hadn’t.’ Brianna was momentarily distracted from the direction of their conversation.
‘You don’t mean that. Whatever you think of me now, your body was always on fire for mine!’
Again she felt that treacherous lick of desire speed along her nerve endings like an unwanted intruder bypassing all her fortifications. This was not a road she wanted to travel down, not at all. Not when everything was collapsing around her ears.
‘And did you find her?’ she asked tightly.
‘I did,’ he answered after only the briefest of hesitations.
‘Who is she?’
‘At the moment, she’s lying in the Cromwell Hospital.’
