A Calculating Heart Read Online Free Page A

out.’
    ‘True.’ He sighed. ‘I’m getting paranoid, fairly understandably. Come on—’ he took her hand and led her from the kitchen ‘—I want to sit down and hold you.’
    He stretched out on the sofa, Camilla nestling against him. They talked for a while about the newspaper article, about what Leo could do about it. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I still feel rather numb. It’s hard to think properly. Thebest thing for me right now is you.’ He kissed her. ‘It seems absurd that you still haven’t moved in. I could do with a bit of domestic security.’
    ‘Leo, it’s not that easy. I can’t just pack up and leave. Jane has to find a new flatmate, and that takes time.’
    ‘I’ve told you that I’ll happily pay dear Jane as much rent as—’
    ‘It’s not just that. It’s not just money. And it’s not just Jane. There are my parents to think about.’
    ‘Oh, God.’
    ‘Leo, look at it from their point of view. How will it sound if I tell them I’m shacking up with some forty-six-year-old? I’m twenty-two. You’re older than my mother, for heaven’s sake.’
    ‘You could point out to them that I’m a perfectly respectable commercial lawyer, who’s—’ He paused. ‘No, I suppose the respectable bit is shot to pieces, isn’t it?’ Leo ran his fingers through his silver hair in exasperation. ‘Christ, if a libel action is what it takes, then so be it. But you’re grown up, for God’s sake. Why worry about what your parents think?’
    ‘Because they are my parents! And I love them. I don’t want to upset them.’ Leo gazed at her. Twenty-two. From a parental point of view, still not much more than a child. She kissed him. ‘I do love you-you know that?’
    Leo returned her kiss gently. ‘
Yes
, I believe you do.’
    She got up. ‘I have to get back to court. Sorry it’s such a fleeting visit. I’ll see you this evening.’
    He lay on the sofa, listening to the sound of the frontdoor closing. He thought about the evening a week ago when he had gone round to her flat. He’d been afraid that he’d lost her, fearful that all the things she’d heard – about his bisexuality, his fling with Anthony, and God knows what else – had estranged her from him for good. Did he now regret the impulse which had prompted him to propose marriage to her? It wasn’t a question of not loving her enough. God knows he did … But if anyone had told him a few years ago that at forty-six he would be on the point of marrying for a second time, he would have laughed in disbelief. Someone whose sexual appetite ran to men as well as women wasn’t exactly ideal husband material. He had spent twenty years cultivating for himself a private life utterly detached from his professional existence, one in which he enjoyed spending the considerable sums he earned in his practice at the Bar, indulging his tastes in clothing, works of art, wine and ridiculously expensive cars. Being tied to someone, unable to do exactly as he pleased, with whomever he pleased, was not his style at all. Which, naturally, was why his marriage to Rachel had come unstuck. One homosexual affair and a fumble with the nanny was probably more than most wives would tolerate in their husbands. Not that his marriage to Rachel had ever been more than one of convenience – his own, at any rate – something to scotch rumours about his sexuality which had, at the time, threatened to harm his professional reputation. And she’d been pregnant. Oliver, his two-year-old son, was the onegood thing to have come out of that mess. He had never thought it possible to love another being as much as he did Oliver … Beyond Oliver and his own mother, Leo didn’t care much for the idea of family.
    At least with Rachel he hadn’t had to contend with anything more than her mother, and those encounters, while she’d been alive, had been mercifully few. With Camilla, however, he was going to get the full works, he could see that. He rubbed his hands