Page 16 of The Secret Sanchez Heir
He was clinging to this whole nonsense being a lie, but why would she lie about this? As fast as he tried to reason away the horror of what had been placed at his door, the counter-arguments piled up.
‘I don’t think—’
‘No!’ His voice cracked like a whip and she flinched and looked around her, but the street was quite empty of people. ‘This situation is no longer within your control! You opened a door and now you can reap the consequences.’
Abigail stared at him, her eyes huge with dismay.
‘Where do you live? And no beating about the bush, Abby. We go there and we go there right now, whether you like it or not.’
His car had been waiting on the other side of the road and Leandro hustled her towards it.
If his driver was in any way curious about the little sketch unfolding, he revealed nothing as he drove the ten minutes it took to get her to her house, a tiny rented place in a row of similar terraced houses.
Of course Claire would be agog. She had no idea that Sam’s father was back on the scene because Abigail hadn’t told her. But everything was happening so swiftly that this wasn’t the time to launch into explanations.
But, as she hugged her friend and gently told her that of course everything was fine, she could practically inhale the scent of Claire’s curiosity.
‘Sam’s asleep,’ was the first thing she told Leandro, spinning round to look at him as soon as the front door was shut.
The house felt ridiculously tiny and his large, looming, threatening presence ate up the oxygen, making her light-headed with foreboding.
‘I want to see him.’
‘Do you still think I’m lying?’
‘So, you have a son.’ Leandro looked at her with flinty eyes. ‘Who’s to say that I am the father?’
‘I would never lie to you about something like that.’ She looked away because she didn’t want to get into a squabble about the past and the lies he felt he had been told. Also, it hurt. It shouldn’t, because he thought nothing of her now, but it still did. She blinked away an urge to cry. ‘Follow me.’ She spun round and he followed her as she made her way up the stairs to the little landing and to her bedroom, where Sam’s cot was pushed up against the wall. It wasn’t an ideal set up, but rents were high in London, and it was the best she could afford.
She always kept the side light by her bed switched on. It was dim and it ensured that she didn’t risk waking him up when she retired to bed for the night. The light was on now because the curtains had been drawn to block out the watery early-afternoon light.
It cast a mellow glow through the bedroom, which was as neat as a pin and done up in calm, neutral colours.
She stood back and Leandro walked towards the cot. He looked down.
He was so tall, so stunningly gorgeous, and she felt the sharp, piercing stab of real guilt that she had kept his son from him. Seeing him there, looking down into Samuel’s cot, deprived her of all excuse for what she had done. A father looking down at his baby son. Sam was sleeping on his back, his short, chubby legs bent like a frog’s at the knees, his arms raised on either side of his head.
Even in the dull, grey light the mop of dark hair and the faint olive of his skin was dramatic proof of paternity.
Staring into the cot, Leandro had no idea how much time passed by because it seemed to stand still. He’d looked out for his sister but he couldn’t remember the time when she’d been as small as this.
Something filled him and he didn’t know what it was. A vague, aching discomfort that was a nasty hollow in the pit of his stomach. The little boy had very dark hair like him, and he was olive-skinned, also like him. Clinging to the notion that he wasn’t a father felt like a fantasy.
But he knew that he had to cling to it for a while longer. He would take nothing for granted. That just wasn’t his nature and so he would not take this for granted even though somewhere deep inside he knew that the child was his.
And Abigail had kept him from him, would have carried on keeping him from him, had fate not forced their paths to cross.
Leandro had never thought about having children but now he was filled with the slow, steady pulse of rage that he’d been kept in the dark about the biggest thing that was possible to happen in anyone’s life.
He turned away from the cot and looked at her, his face all angles and shadows. Then he moved towards her.
‘Time...to talk.’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘I’LL WANT A DNA TEST,’ was the first thing Leandro said the second they were in her kitchen. He hadn’t paid a scrap of attention to his surroundings, but now he did, and he didn’t like what he saw. A small, shabby house hardly big enough to swing a cat in. Fresh paint and cheerful posters couldn’t quite conceal the fact that the place was probably held together by masking tape and glue, and the rage that had swept through him earlier on, after he had looked down at the dark-haired baby in the cot, swept through him once again—a red tide that made him clench his jaw in an effort to exert some control.
There was still room for doubt.
