She wanted to say thank you, but her voice had been stolen so she smiled at him instead. Their gazes held and his nostrils flared. The moment shockingly potent. Simone was transported back to their time on the dance floor. Their bodies close, moving as one in an intoxicating synchronicity. The way his thumb hypnotically stroked the gleaming satin of her dress at her side. Simone didn’t want to think about it, or to dwell. It had to be the whirlwind engagement and getting swept up in the day. That was all it was. Clearly her romantic fantasies hadn’t quite left her when faced with their current and strange reality of this marriage of convenience. Even if she’d learned from painful experience that love was meaningless and easily bought off. But today wasn’t really for lingering on past hurts. It was all about navigating her future. She took a small sip of her drink, the sweet nutty flavour sliding over her tongue.
‘Are you sure about the absence of your family today? Not even your sister?’
The words caught her mid swallow. She forced her drink down, her eyes watering, trying not to cough. ‘Why ask the question now, when the day’s over?’
He hadn’t shown much interest before and had accepted without comment that she didn’t have anyone she wanted to invite. His attention now was strange and unsettling.
Leo didn’t answer her immediately. He placed his drink down on an occasional table beside him. He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it carefully over an armchair, then sat on the couch at the other end from her. He tugged his bowtie undone, unfastened the top two studs of his dress shirt, then simply sprawled in the chair. He looked magnificently indolent, though she knew him better than that.
‘I’m curious now,’ he said, retrieving and sipping his drink. He held his glass almost negligently in his elegant hand, whereas she now gripped hers so tightly she feared she might crack it.
Some people might have likened him to a housecat in that moment, the way he lounged with a lazy expression. His eyes hooded, almost sleepy. The corners of his generous lips quirked into a sardonic kind of smile that had been written about and dissected by too many fashion commentators to be at all sensible or logical. Yet she’d never make the mistake of thinking of him as anything other than a panther, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce.
The more casual Leo appeared, the more watchful you had to be.
Simone had seen him like this before, when a new subcontractor hadn’t done their job, having been lulled into a false sense of security that he was so laid back they could get away with shortcuts, only to be trapped by the inevitable attack on their workmanship that they hadn’t seen coming.
People soon learned he could ruin them with an offhand comment. That’s when they all fell into line. It was an incredible power he held. Yet she wouldn’t let him wield it over her. People, like her parents, had tried before. Everyone had failed.
She shrugged, trying to match his casual attitude whilst inside it felt as if she was tangled in complicated knots. ‘I’m certain. My sister hasn’t been well and as for the rest… You know what families are like.’
Hers had seen fit to pay off her boyfriend. She’d met Jace at college. He was someone she’d known that her parents wouldn’t have approved of, but that hadn’t mattered at the time. Who cared that he was a boy that people might have said was from the wrong side of the tracks? He’d made good and had been awarded entry on a partial scholarship. Simone had admired him for it. Jace had chased her. Courted her. Acted like he respected her. Showered her with attention that her emotion starved little heart had soaked up like parched earth on a rainy day. All her life she’d been taught to wait till she was married before sleeping with someone and, in her naivety, Simone believed that’s what she’d wanted too. But on meeting Jace she’d questioned everything she’d once believed. Why would she have waited to sleep with him when he said he loved her? They’d planned a future together.
Even now, she didn’t know what had been fake and what had been real. People claimed he’d been spreading stories about her. How simple it was to get her into bed. How he’d corrupted the poor little rich girl. Made jokes about it. And maybe that was true. Simone took a deep, slow breath. It might have been eight years ago, but it still ached like the wound was fresh. A knife to her tender heart that had never recovered. She blinked back the burn in her eyes because Leo would notice and he’d never get this part of her, that humiliation.
She’d learned a few things back then. How fickle her friends were. How they’d laughed behind her back for picking the poor kid to date. About how she’dfallen. Other boys in their group, sons of family friends she’d known since she’d been a child, had tried to come onto her because she’d apparently become fair game. A woman who could be fooled into bed. An easy mark.
The only thing she was sure about was how her parents had paid Jace off. Not for her own good, to save their beloved daughter, but to add to her humiliation. To show how easily they could wield their money to buy someone, especially when they threw it back in her face. Calling her home as if she was some kind of disgrace because she’d committed the sin of being talked about, rather than a heartbroken girl who needed their support. Showing her how little she was worth to the man she’d believed she’d marry one day, because they’d made promises to each other and she’d trusted them.
Simone realised then, that her relationship with her parents was entirely transactional. Her mom and dad cared more about their reputation than her. Even her brother had berated her, as if he was some scion of virtue when he’d slept his way through a swathe of girls, both in high school and in his own college years. It was then she’d decided to make her own way. The betrayal of her family was too great, their disdain of her impossible to bear. When she finally stood up for herself and said she didn’t want what her parents demanded she accept as her life, they’d turned their backs. So, she’d walked away from it all, even Holly. Their relationship suffered because Holly was too young to understand why her big sister was leaving. That estrangement only really changed when her sister fell pregnant and recognised what Simone might have gone through. Getting in touch after eight long years of silence.
In all of this, the irony wasn’t lost on Simone that she was now married to the kind of man her parents might have dreamed of for her. His wealth manifestly eclipsing theirs and all of their friends combined, even if he didn’t have generations of illustrious family connections and old money behind him.
He was entirely self-made.
‘Since I don’t have a family, you might be surprised,’ he said drawing her from a time she’d rather forget.
His past had been well ventilated in the press, though she was less interested in how Leo had been discovered by a modelling talent scout and more in how he’d survived when he’d been left with nothing. Born to a single mother, an artist and designer. Ending up on the streets as a teen, alone and hungry. His mother dying when he was barely an adult.
She hated thinking of that young man struggling to survive, which was why she was so determined for Holly to be protected. When she’d left home, she’d been lucky. Finding employment as an office junior. Working her way up in the company to become an executive assistant before leaving with an impeccable reference.
Not everyone had that kind of luck or those advantages.
‘I didn’t want what my parents wanted for me. They weren’t happy about that. It’s not an uncommon story,’ she explained briefly. He didn’t need any more of her sorry story.
‘Then I’m surprised you didn’t invite them to show them what you’ve achieved despite them.’
The only person she’d wanted here was Holly, but her doctors couldn’t recommend she fly. Her placenta was low lying and she’d been bleeding. Holly also had higher than normal blood pressure. The constant threat of those complications meant it wasn’t safe to travel and a lot of the time she needed bed rest.
‘I have nothing to prove to people I’m wholly disinterested in. They don’t need my emotional energy.’
‘An admirable sentiment.’
Leo raised his glass to her. Like he’d raised it to her during his speech.
Tomy bride,who seems to have surprised everyone, but humbled me, by accepting my proposal.
There’d been chuckles in the crowd at that, even though Simone doubted Leo did much of anything, without knowing the answer first.
