Brianna’s body responded with the knee-jerk response of immediate reaction, as though responding with learned behaviour. Her mouth parted and the feel his tongue thrusting against her was as heady as the most powerful drug. Her mind emptied and she kissed him back, and she felt as though she never wanted the kiss to end. The coolness of his withdrawal, leaving her with her mouth still slightly parted and her eyes half-closed, was a horrifying return to reality.
‘Point proven,’ he murmured softly. ‘So, when I tell you that you need to look outside the box and start seeing the upsides to my proposal, you know what I’m talking about. This won’t be a union without one or two definite bonuses.’
‘I’ll never move to London and I’ll never marry you.’ Her breathing was only now returning to normal and the mortification of what she had done, of how her treacherous body had betrayed her, felt like acid running through her veins. ‘I’m going now but I’ll give you a call in a couple of days. When you’re ready to accept what I’ve said, then we’ll talk again.’ She stood up on wobbly legs and turned her back. The urge to run away as fast as she could was overpowering, and she did. Out to the pavement, where she hailed the nearest taxi and instructed him to drive her to a hotel—something cheap, something close to the airport.
She wouldn’t marry him. He didn’t love her and there was no way that she would ever accept sacrificing both their lives for the wrong reason, whatever he said about the bonus of good sex. Good sex would die and then where would they be?
But she had to get away because she knew that there was something craven and weak in the very deepest part of her that might just play with the idea.
And there was no way she was going to give that weak, craven part of her a voice.
CHAPTER NINE
LEO LOOKED AT the sprawling house facing him and immediately wondered whether he had gone for the wrong thing. Too big, maybe? Too ostentatious? Too much land?
He shook his head with frustration and fired a couple of questions at the estate agent without bothering to glance in her direction.
In the space of six weeks, this was the eighth property he had personally seen out in the rolling Berkshire countryside, sufficiently far away from London to promote the idea of clean air, whilst being within easy commuting distance from the city.
Brianna had no idea that he was even hunting down a house. As far as she was concerned, he was the guy she’d refused to commit to who seemed intent on pursuing her even though she had already given him her answer—again and again and again, in varying formats, but all conveying the same message.
No thank you, I won’t be getting married to you.
On the upside, he had managed to persuade her temporarily to move to London, although that in itself had been a task of no small order. She had refused to budge, had informed him that he was wasting his time, that they weren’t living in the Victorian ages. She had folded her arms, given him a gimlet stare of pure stubbornness. He had been reduced to deviating from his intention to get what he wanted—what was needed, at all costs—in favour of thinking creatively.
For starters, he had had to pursue her to Ireland because she’d refused to continue her conversation with him in London. And then, he had had to travel to the pub to see her, because she didn’t want him staying under her roof, not given the circumstances. He had refrained from pointing out the saying about horses bolting and stable doors. He had initiated his process of getting what he wanted by pointing out that it made sense.
He had done that over the finest meal to be had in a really very good restaurant not a million miles away from the pub. He had used every argument in the book and had got precisely nowhere. Then he had returned, this time to try and persuade her to see his point of view during a bracing walk by one of the lakes with the wind whipping his hair into disarray and his mega-expensive coat proving no match for the cold. He had tried to remind her of the sexual chemistry that was still there between them, but had cut short that line of argument when she’d threatened to walk back to the pub without him.
He had informed her that there wasn’t a single woman alive who wouldn’t have chewed off his arm to accept an offer of marriage from him, which had been another tactical error.
He had dropped all talk of anything and concentrated on just making her feel comfortable in his presence, whilst marvelling that she could carry on keeping him at arm’s length, considering how close they had been. But by this point he had been clued up enough to make sure that he didn’t hark back to the past. Nothing to remind her about how much she clearly loathed him, having found out about his lies.