Hired for the Boss's Bedroom (11 page)

‘In
other words
, I would recognise that having your life disrupted might interfere with your work, ergo a lack of income. End of story.’

Deprived of that line of argument, Heather huffed and then said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t dream of charging you for being here with Daniel if you’re not around—which isn’t to say that you have carte blanche to pop in now and again whenever it happens to suit you. And another thing—no women.’

‘Come again?’

‘No women.’

‘And why would that be?’

Heather’s cheeks flamed. ‘Because it would be disres—’

‘Climb off your high horse! I wouldn’t dream of bringing any women up here. But, as a matter of interest,’ he added, ‘would you be jealous? Because that’s just the sort of condition a jealous woman might consider.’ He laughed again, because now she looked fit to explode. Give her a second or two, and he would have to dodge some serious aerial bombardment from whatever heavy objects were to hand. He had been stressed out, but finally he was beginning to relax.

‘You really need to sit down and have a chat with your ego, Leo. If you let me know when you’re going to be away…’

‘Let you know? My life isn’t predictable like that. No, I have a much better idea. You move in, and that way we can both save ourselves a lot of trouble making phone calls or knocking on doors. That would seem the most sensible option, wouldn’t you agree?’

L
ESS
than thirty-six hours later, Heather was standing in the sprawling hall of Katherine’s house, watching with her mouth open as Leo basically commandeered the place. The man hadn’t been kidding when he had told her that he didn’t let the grass grow under his feet. The house was teeming with people in uniforms who were efficiently doing all sorts of clever things to turn two of the downstairs rooms into offices. In the midst of this organised chaos, Leo was standing, mobile glued to his ear, giving hand commands to the men while he restlessly barked orders to some hapless soul on the other end of the line.

Heather had just come across to fetch some books for Katherine and a few changes of clothes, but she was transfixed by the scene unfolding in front of her.

Three men, bending under the weight of an enormous desk, jostled her from behind, and she let out a little yelp and sidestepped them.

Just then, Leo spotted her dithering by the front door and he snapped his mobile shut and headed in her direction.

Despite the cataclysmic changes to his routine, he was feeling pretty good. When he had told his mother that he would be moving into her house so that she need not worry about Daniel, he had been first surprised, then tickled pink by the exuberance of her gratitude. Daniel was his responsibility, after all, he had thought with a stab of guilt. How distant had he and his mother become that she would think that he might swoop in and out, leaving them all to muddle along the best they could? Notwithstanding, he had left the hospital feeling well disposed and in high spirits.

He had also, in an unprecedented U-turn, decided to change his plans. Instead of dipping in and out to the best of his ability, he would simply shift his working arena from London to his mother’s house. He wouldn’t be able to guarantee a one-hundred-percent attendance rate, but his movements would certainly be a little more predictable. He had felt good making that decision, and he felt good now, watching his stuff being shifted in, everything that would turn his mother’s den and little snug into a working environment suitable for him.

Heather, he noticed, was gulping like a fish out of water and looking as though she had barged into a scene from a science fiction movie.

‘What on earth is going on?’ she gasped when he was virtually on top of her.

‘What does it look like? I’m kitting out some work space for myself.’

And he wasn’t above getting down and dirty in the process, she noted, taking in the low-slung, faded jeans and the tee shirt, likewise faded; he was displaying all the signs of a man sweating at some manual labour.

In fact, her nostrils quivered at his rough, masculine scent. Whoever said that aftershave was a turn on?

‘You never said…’ she stammered, and he raised his eyebrows sardonically.

‘I didn’t think I had to run it by you to get permission first.’

‘That’s not what I meant! I just hadn’t expected that you would be moving in lock, stock and smoking barrel!’ She watched in horror as he stripped off the tee shirt and tossed it across the oak banister. Sure, it was hot and sure, he was sweaty and looked as though he had been lifting a few heavy objects, but was that really necessary? She dragged her eyes away from the fascinating sight of his bare chest, bronzed and muscled, his nipples flat and brown. To look at him now, no one could ever accuse him of being a soft, desk-bound money maker. In fact, he looked like a man born into manual work, and extremely challenging manual work. There wasn’t a spare ounce of flab on him. She cleared her throat nervously and pinned her eyes to his amused face.

‘Does Katherine know that you’re rearranging all her furniture?’ she snapped in a high voice. Now she sounded like a school mistress—prim, proper, disapproving.
He
was supposed to be the buttoned-up businessman, and
she
was supposed to be the easygoing artist. When had this role reversal occurred? she wondered feverishly. ‘I just thought that your presence here was going to be on a more casual basis, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t think that
casual
would work, given the circumstances. Care to have a look at the furniture rearrangements while you’re here? Then you can report back to my mother.’

‘Of course I’m not going to report back to your mother!’

‘No? It’s just that you suddenly seemed ablaze with self-righteous zeal.’

Heather scowled as, amused, he turned his back on her and began walking towards what had been Katherine’s snug and den.
Self-righteous zeal?
Not content with making her feel like Miss Haversham, he had now managed to reduce her to prissy schoolmarm with an overdeveloped streak of Puritanism.

And her body was still in a state of hyper-sensitivity at the sight of his semi-nudity.

Her legs unfroze from where they had been nailed to the floor and she tripped behind him, still scowling, to pull up short in front of a fully functioning office in progress. Ornaments, dainty bits of furniture, pot plants, all had been cleared away and replaced by modems, telephones, a fax machine and a small, flat-screen TV which constantly recorded the levels of the stock market. This was a male-dominated space now, and the dominating male was currently looking around him with an expression of satisfaction.

‘What do you think?’ Leo asked, spinning on his heels to face her. It was strange how much he enjoyed getting under her skin. Maybe it was pay back for her getting under
his
skin. And maybe there was an even bigger pay back to be had. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought as he watched her trying not to watch him, if her defences came crashing down even though she didn’t want them to? Wouldn’t it be satisfying if she found herself jumping from her moral high-ground even though her brain told her that she shouldn’t?

The brain, after all, was a strange thing. You could go blue in the face telling it to do something and it would just head off at a tangent and go its own merry way. Wasn’t that what had happened with him? He had sworn himself off her but, now that he was here, and that so was she, some inner devil he hadn’t known he possessed was playing mind-games with him—and he liked these mind-games. Hadn’t he always been big into sport, both of the intellectual and the physical variety?

Right now she was as stiff as a block of wood, and was making damned sure to look anywhere but at him.

‘You’re bristling.’

‘I am
not
bristling.’

‘My mother’s stuff has been safely stored away in one of the other rooms. You can rest assured that I haven’t started a bonfire with the lot. If you like, I can take you for an inspection, make sure I haven’t broken anything in the moving process.’

‘Ha, ha. Hilarious. Just out of interest, exactly how long are you planning to stay?’ Heather asked, roaming round the room and inspecting all the new additions with a jaundiced eye. She could feel him behind her, all alpha-male temptation, which her disobedient fingers were longing to touch. She folded her arms just in case they developed a mind of their own.

‘As long as it takes. Within reason, of course.’

‘You’ve gone to all this expense for a few days?’

‘
Days?
That’s either a monumental understatement or a severe case of wishful thinking. I would think along the line of
weeks
rather than days.’

‘All right, then.
Weeks.
’

‘Time is money, and it pays for me to be able to work to a hundred-percent capacity while I’m here.’

‘You’ve certainly done away with all the atmosphere,’ Heather remarked, looking at the black ash-and-chrome desk festooned with high-tech equipment, so at odds with the faded, flowered wallpaper and the lonesome bowl of pot pourri on the bookcase which Leo had obviously missed by accident.

‘It pays to have a working environment that’s devoid of distractions.’ No peculiar, baggy jogging-bottoms and oversized sweat shirt today. She was wearing a cotton dress with a pattern of very tiny flowers and a pair of sandals. He wondered, idly, exactly how long it would take him to undo the innumerable little pearl buttons that hooked her in.

He was vaguely aware that she was doing it again, making him lose focus, encouraging his rebellious mind to take a stroll down a pleasurable, imaginary path. Whereas before this had infuriated the hell out of him, Leo was fast losing interest in the urge to question the fact that the woman confused and confounded him like no other woman had ever done before.

Having always been a great believer in the inescapable truth that ‘fate’ was the last fallback of people who were too weak to realise that they controlled events, rather than the other way around, he was quite happy to put a different spin on things now. Fate had seen fit to throw them together, and who was he to deny his primal, manly urge to hunt and capture? He had tried bringing all his formidable intelligence and powers of reasoning to bear on the matter and what good had it done him? He had still ended up thinking of the woman way too much for his own good.

Logically, he deduced that if he could have her then he would be able to get her out of his system. Naturally, he would not be putting himself out to that end. It was all very well to rise above rejection, but he had his limits. No; she would come to him.
She
would surrender into his arms of her own volition. It would be a truly sweet surrender.

He surfaced to find her looking at him, at the tail end of something that had clearly been sarcastic, judging from the curl of her pink mouth.

‘Sorry. Miles away. What did you say?’

Prissy
, Heather thought,
self-righteous, zealous in all the wrong ways.
And now, to top it all, so boring that he had completely switched off from what she had been saying about liking distractions in the working environment.

‘I was saying that I should get the clothes that I came for and then head for the hospital.’

‘Give me half an hour. I’ll take you.’

‘There’s no need, Leo…’

‘No need for me to visit my mother?’

‘You know that’s not what I mean! You just seem to be very busy here.’

‘Why don’t you let me decide whether I can take time out or not? As you can see, I’m a big boy, more than capable of making decisions without a helping hand.’

Heather blushed furiously at the rebuke, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was walking towards the door, pausing to discuss something with the guy who appeared to be in charge, then he turned to her.

‘Why don’t you go and do whatever it is you came here to do and meet me back in the hall in thirty minutes?’

‘And why don’t you stop giving orders?’

Leo shrugged and began making for the staircase. Heather was behind him. He could hear the soft tread of her steps above the noise of banging coming from the direction of the office. It was amazing how easy it was to rile her, he thought; not that that had been his intention. She was like a cat on a hot tin roof when she was around him, jumping at everything he said, bristling at hidden meanings to throwaway remarks, generally acting as though she would go up in smoke if he came too close to her.

‘It’s in my nature to give orders,’ he said, not turning around. ‘Why do you think that’s a bad thing?’

‘I’m surprised the people who work for you don’t want you strung up! Don’t you know that telling people what to do gets their back up?’

‘Some people need telling what to do.’ He made a right at the top of the staircase and was by his bedroom door when he finally turned to look at her. ‘Besides, how else is a company supposed to be run unless there’s someone in charge telling other people what to do? As a matter of fact, though, if you ask any of the people who work for me they’ll tell you that I’m a pretty fair employer. Big bonuses, generous maternity and paternity leave, fantastic pension scheme…Nothing to complain about.’ He leaned against the doorframe and stared down at her. ‘Anyway,’ he drawled, ‘don’t you think that some people actually
like
being told what to do?’

‘No.’

‘Because your ex made it his habit to tell
you
what to do?’

Heather flushed and then laughed derisively. ‘Brian didn’t tell me what to do. He just left me in the dark as to what
he
was up to. Anyway, that’s not the point.’

Leo pushed himself away from the door frame and turned his back on her. ‘You should loosen up,’ he threw provocatively over his shoulder. ‘You might find that life’s less hard work when you’re not continually arguing the finer points. In other words,’ he added for good measure, ‘you might actually
enjoy
being subservient…’

Heather was transfixed by the sight of him as he strolled towards his dressing table, leaning to support himself, hands flat on the polished wooden surface as he idly glanced down at the open laptop computer, then standing up, massaging his shoulder with one hand as he walked back towards her. The sound of his murmured, lazy voice was like a drug, making her thoughts sluggish and not giving her time to get herself all worked up by what he was saying.

‘Subservient? I—I can’t think of anything worse…’ she stammered. She was having difficulty remembering what the original topic of conversation had been.

‘No? Funny. Every woman I have ever known has ended up enjoying being controlled. Not in the boardroom, of course.’

He was standing right in front of her, and Heather took a couple of little steps back.

‘Good for them.’

‘You are not like them, however. That much I’ll concede. But I guarantee there’s one order I can give you that you’ll jump to obey.’

‘What?’ she flung at him defiantly, her nerves skittering as he produced a wicked grin and reached for the zip on his jeans.

‘Leave now or else watch me undress. I’m going to have a quick shower.’

Heather was out in two seconds flat. And in half an hour, during which the majority of Leo’s extreme makeover appeared to have been completed, all bar the detail, she was standing at the door, still unnerved by that grinning last word he had had before she had fled the bedroom.

When he finally appeared, his hair was still damp and the jeans and sweaty tee shirt had been replaced with a pair of cream trousers and a cream shirt which made him look infuriatingly healthy and full of beans.