Prologue
The lights that had been on earlier when they left the house were still blazing as the car turned into the long tree-lined driveway of the Manor. In the driver’s seat Amy’s father was silent, as he had been the entire journey back from the hospital.
It wasn’t a relaxed, comfortable silence; it was a tense, nerve-stretching absence of sound.
The only times he had even acknowledged her presence was when he’d delivered a series of poisonous icy glares when she had dared risk a surreptitious glance at the numerous missed messages on her phone screen.
Amy’s fingers remained curled around the phone but after a swift sideways glance at her father’s profile—even his double chin looked furious—she didn’t pull it out. A spasm of self-contempt tugged the corners of her lips downward.
Not so brave now, sneered the voice in her head.
Earlier, it had been a different story.
She had stood defiant in the face of her parents’ reaction, even though normally her mother would act as the voice of moderation whenever she incurred her father’s displeasure, but not this time.
Her parents had been united in their horror.
Amy shook her head as though the action would physically block the scene that continued to play out in her head in a loop.
It didn’t.
‘How far has this gone?’ her father thundered inside her head as the replay loop reached the cliffhanger moment.
‘How far has it gone…?’ she’d repeated. ‘No further than I wanted it to.’
Her mother whimpered and gasped, ‘My baby!’
The memory of that response twisted the knife of guilt a few painful inches deeper in Amy’s chest.
‘Mum, this isn’t a Victorian melodrama and I’m not a child. I’m nineteen next week.’
Lost in her own miserable thoughts, she didn’t notice the engine had been switched off until her father opened the car door, still ignoring her. Amy caught his sleeve and he swung around, his eyes sliding from her face to her hand grasping the tweed of his jacket.
When she let go, he smoothed the fabric as though she had contaminated it with her touch.
‘Mum will be all right, won’t she, Dad?’
Despite the doctors’ confident assertions, Amy still found it difficult to believe, even after her prayers had been answered and her mother had regained consciousness.
Amy would have promised anything at that moment, and she had.
She flinched now as her father’s response was a slammed door.
The security lights came on as he marched towards the front door they must have left wide open in their hurry to leave in the slipstream of the ambulance’s blue flashing lights.
Biting her already raw full lower lip, Amy extricated herself from the passenger seat and stood in the shadows of the semi lit forecourt. The night air hit her, cooling her skin but not the swirling mass of tormented emotions twisting in her head.
Out of habit, she glanced up at the clock tower above the arch that led to the stable block, her eyes widening when she saw it was one-thirty.
Had it really only been six hours earlier when she had stood, bag packed, telling her parents of her intention to leave?
She knew her over-confident declaration had been defensively aggressive to compensate for the fact her knees were shaking and her stomach churning in apprehension.
Having spent her life wrapped in cotton wool that had come to feel like a strait jacket she was breaking free of, taking a massive step into the unknown and facing parental disapproval, it was small wonder her knees had been shaking.
Six hours—which meant that Leo had been waiting for her for five hours by now. She had allowed herself a comfortable hour to get to their prearranged meeting spot. She had been terrified of being late and somehow missing him.
Was he still waiting?
What had he thought when she didn’t show?
Amy’s cold fingers tightened around the phone in her pocket. She wished she could regain some of her earlier bravery, that utter certainty of several hours ago that had buoyed her.
That certainty had dissolved as she’d witnessed her mother’s body jerk like a broken doll in response to the shock from the paddles the paramedics had administered. The horror she’d felt had killed all her confidence stone dead, even before her father had snarled, ‘You did this!’
Amy was no longer made brave by the naive conviction that love would make everything all right. The conviction that had made her stand quietly throughout a storm of accusations and threats, culminating in her father’s parting shot.
‘Walk through that door and that’s it—I have no daughter.’
The ultimatum had shaken her but she’d held her ground. ‘You won’t accept that I’m with Leo, but I love him and I know we’re meant to be together. I have no choice.’
She knew differently now; there was a choice and it was one she had made when her mother had regained consciousness and pulled off her oxygen mask long enough to plead.
‘Don’t do this, Amy, don’t go with him—promise me, promise me.’
‘I promise, Mum.’
Amy walked towards the open door, but her father had already disappeared from view. The elegant chandelier illuminated the graceful curving staircase that Amy had been halfway down when her mother’s anguished cry had made Amy turn in time to see her clutch her chest and collapse.
She had a vague recollection of running back up the stairs and falling on her knees by her mother’s prone form.
Her father had been there too, his face as red as her mother’s had been pale. ‘Are you happy now that you’ve nearly killed her?’
Amy blinked back tears as the scene continued to relentlessly play out in her head. She stared at the phone in her hand, remembering how she’d had to yell to make herself heard above her father’s abusive flow of bitter accusations as she gave the requested details to the emergency services.
‘Is she breathing?’ she’d been asked.
‘I don’t know!’ Amy had wailed, frustration and gut-clenching fear making it hard to respond to the calm instructions of the person on the other end of the line.
‘Yes, I think her airway is clear…but her lips are blue. Chest compressions? I… Right…’
When the paramedic had appeared, she had literally sobbed her relief, the floodgates opening and tears falling in a river down her cheeks as she fell back onto her heels and manoeuvred herself out of their way.
The journey behind the ambulance remained a surreal blur.
The arrival in the casualty unit was equally dreamlike, but certain details stood out, like seeing the heart emoji on her phone screen when they had been asked to switch off mobiles as they walked through what felt like a sinister forest of bleeping machines to the cubicle where her mum lay, surrounded by a scary number of medical staff.
As she reached the first of the flight of steps that led to the front door, Amy heard footsteps from inside the house and braced her shoulders, fighting an urge to delay the moment when she would be alone with her father.
She was working up her courage when a rustle made her turn her head in time to see a tall, lean figure separate itself from the purple-shadowed glossy undergrowth.
‘Leo!’ Shock and longing were intertwined in her gasp as she identified the figure standing there.
‘I… I… You can’t be here.’ She looked nervously over her shoulder.
The situation was awful enough without Leo, who didn’t have a clue what it was like to be on the receiving end of her father’s temper.
He took a step forward, the light illuminating his features. It highlighted the sharp cheekbones, the symmetrical planes and hollows, his perfect features dissected by a narrow blade of a nose, the sculpted sultry curve of his incredible mouth.
The shadows did nothing to dilute his masculine aura, the tingling charge of danger he gave off. The danger had initially attracted her, but it was his passion and sensitivity that had kept her with him, that had turned her lust to love.
The high-octane masculinity hit her now like a shockwave, grabbing hard at the muscles low in her belly, the longing so strong she could barely breathe. The sense of loss that followed felt like a hard, dark weight lodged behind her breastbone.
‘Where have you been, Amy?’ He moved closer and the light hit his face, leaving half in darkness, half in light.
The emotions in his dark eyes reached out to grab her.
He wasn’t angry, just frustrated and confused, his dark brows drawn into a questioning line above his hawkish nose as he stared at her. ‘I waited for you…’
She knew it was crazy but it was a fact; she could feel his voice. Deep velvet with a fascinating back note of gravel, it vibrated through every cell in her body.
‘What have they done to you?’
She stood there on the balls of her feet, poised to run into the arms he held open in invitation.
An invitation she longed to accept, to walk into his arms to feel the hardness of his lean body, smell the warm male scent of his skin.
The longing rose up in her and she wanted nothing more than to lay her head against his chest and hear his heartbeat and feel his strong arms close protectively around her.
She wanted the rest of the world to go away and there to be nothing but her and Leo.
When Leo was with her she felt braver and stronger; it always felt as if he’d peeled away a layer and exposed the real her.
With him, she was more herself than she had ever been before she’d met him.
The same way his lovemaking seemed to somehow drive her deeper into herself, making her self-aware at a cellular level in a way she could not define.
‘Is sex always like this?’ she had asked him after that first time, because she’d had nothing to compare it to.
‘Not for me it isn’t,’ he’d replied, looking as stunned as she had felt.
Her eyes on his face like a sleepwalker, she took a half step towards him, remembering as she did so how she’d felt the first time she’d set eyes on him. Her nervous system had gone into meltdown, her brain short-circuited. She had never experienced anything so visceral in her life before.
He had terrified her, not because there was anything threatening in his behaviour; despite his physicality, the opposite was true. The way his big hands with their long, tapering brown fingers had moved down the nervous colt’s flanks was incredibly gentle.
She had been too stunned in the moment by the whirlwind of sensation inside her to register how the skittish animal responded to the soft words the most beautiful man she had ever imagined was murmuring into its ear.
Sensing her presence, he had turned his head, brushing his hands along the torn denim that covered his muscular thighs.
Amy had shivered as fire crackled along her nerve-endings when his dark eyes connected with her stare. She could see the flare of awareness flash in his, and then he’d smiled and she was lost.
‘I am so sorry, Leo,’ she pushed out, feeling the heat of tears that pressed against her eyelids. The deep ache of loss in her belly.
From nowhere, the rain came. Under the shelter of the porticoed porch she stayed dry, but in seconds Leo was drenched—not that he reacted to it, or the water that ran down his face, glossing his golden skin—skin she loved to touch.
In her peripheral vision she was aware of her father appearing in the doorway behind her. She half turned and saw that he was holding a phone in his hand, wielding it like a weapon, not looking at her but at Leo.
‘I’ve already called the police to tell them we have an intruder. I’m filming this, so keep your distance!’ he added, even though Leo hadn’t moved. But without moving at all he suddenly seemed taller and even more imposing.
Leo stared her father down before his glance shifted to Amy, lingering on her face for a long moment.
There was no doubt in his face, just encouragement.
The fact he believed in her and had total confidence that she would take the hand he stretched towards her made not doing so the most painful thing she’d ever experienced in her life.
Amy saw the brief look of confusion flicker across his chiselled features before he switched his scrutiny to her father.
‘I didn’t come here to argue with you. I just came here for Amy.’
Amy stared again at the hand extended to her, the internal conflict that was raging inside her finding release in a series of white-faced, agonised gasps. ‘You don’t understand, Leo.’
For three seconds their eyes held, then he broke the contact as his hand fell down.
‘I think maybe I do. You want this.’ His hand lifted again but this time his sweeping gesture encompassed the illuminated manor house.
‘You like your designer life, you love it…the tennis clubs, the skiing holidays. You were never going to walk away from it all, were you?’ His shoulders lifted in a shrug as one dark brow elevated.
‘I get it,’ he ground out, his gorgeous voice now sounding like broken glass.
‘No, it’s not like that at all! I just can’t…’
‘Amy.’
Her father’s voice stopped her in her tracks.
‘I am so sorry, Leo, but—’
His head reared back as he made a cutting gesture with his hand. ‘I don’t need buts. Goodbye, Amy. It’s certainly been an…experience.’
He turned and walked away, taking something of Amy with him.