Hired for the Boss's Bedroom (19 page)

And I’m not about to let you go.
That thought sliced through Leo’s consciousness like a razor blade, shearing away at his fundamental acceptance that the chosen path of his life was to remain free of the encumbrance of a woman tied to him by a band of gold. He had his son. It was enough. He was not even aware that he had spoken his thoughts out loud until Heather, standing as still as a statue, asked him to repeat what he had said.

‘You’re right,’ he told her, walking towards where she had managed to field him off by edging towards the mantelpiece. He was no longer aware of his brother. It was as if a genie in a lamp had magically made him disappear. There was a roaring in his ears, but still he felt good. Calm. ‘I’m a different kind of creep.’

‘Wha…?’ The whole parallel-universe thing was happening again. She wanted to move out of Leo’s reach, but her feet stubbornly refused to oblige. What had he been talking about when he had said that he refused to let her go? Had she heard correctly? Her heart was beating so fast that she felt faint. Or maybe it was just the way he was staring at her, his fabulous eyes reaching down into the depths of her and stirring everything around. It was so unfair that this was what love was all about: allowing someone in who had the power to scramble your brains.

‘I am prepared to make a commitment to you,’ Leo announced with largesse.

‘You’re “prepared to make a commitment” to me?’

‘Correct,’ Leo asserted.

‘What sort of commitment?’ Heather asked faintly.

‘Are there different kinds?’ He frowned, just a tiny bit thrown by her lack of a suitably rapturous response.

‘Yes, there are different kinds!’ Heather was compelled to point out, because her mind, which had turned to cotton wool for a moment, was finally cranking back into gear and warning her that their definitions of commitment would almost certainly not coincide. Leo’s idea of commitment would be, in his opinion, to generously allocate a few months rather than a few weeks to a relationship, and to maybe tone down the tenor of his remarks when discussing any plans that stretched beyond a two-day time limit. Accept that, her mind was telling her, and she would be no better off than she was now. In fact, she’d be worse off, because she would have longer to fall even deeper in love with him.

‘How so?’ Leo demanded, but cautiously.

‘You know how I feel about relationships,’ Heather told him quietly.

‘Then maybe,’ he said in an undertone, ‘we should get married.’ He was gratified by the alteration in her expression. After everything he had been through over the past few days, he had never expected to land up in this place, and from the look of it neither had she. It was as if suddenly he was released to have her, and any misgivings about finding himself in such wildly unexpected terrain were wiped out by the knowledge that she was now his.

Predictably, he felt his body harden as his imagination ran amok, conjuring up pleasurable images of exploring her naked body, tasting her, losing himself in her fabulous curves. His eyes smouldered in anticipation of touching her, but for the moment he interrupted her stupefied, gaping silence to say quietly, ‘I’ll leave you to think about it, hmm?’ He reached out and curled a finger into her hair, and admitted what he had been so strenuously denying for days—that, yes, she took his breath away. ‘Because now there are things that have to be said between my brother and me.’

Think about it?
Heather was in a daze. She felt as though, if she probed too deeply into his extravagant proposal—which seemed so out of keeping with everything she had assumed about him—then it would disappear like dew on a hot summer day.

‘But—’

‘No
buts.
’ He kissed her parted mouth, a kiss that was both chaste and deeply, deeply sexy at the same time.

‘Okay.’ Heather sighed when his lips finally left hers.

‘And we’ll talk…later.’

Afterwards, a mere three hours that felt like three decades, Heather wondered what that promised land would have looked like had fate not decided to show her, had not guided her foolish steps back to that sitting room with two mugs of coffee to find that the door was ajar, just a slither. Just enough for her to overhear a conversation that was as destructive as a hammer shattering a pane of glass.

Sitting in her cottage while the clock chimed midnight she wished she could cry, but she was all cried out for the moment—although she suspected that, when the tears finally came, they would never stop. She would just drown in her own self-made misery.

T
HE
past three hours had been cathartic for Leo. Indeed, he felt as though he had been sucked into a whirlpool, spun around at dangerous speed and then spat out. He had been stripped of his cynicism; of course it would return in time, because that was part and parcel of his personality, but right at the moment he felt weirdly exposed.

He also still had to talk to Heather. He was looking forward to it. In fact, he couldn’t wait.

Having become accustomed to her being under the same roof as him, it was only when he was virtually outside the door to the room she had used while she had been in his mother’s house that it struck Leo that she wouldn’t be there. She naturally had returned to her cottage. He spun round on his heels and took the stairs two at a time, leaving the house as quietly as he could and choosing to walk to her place, giving himself a head start on collating his thoughts.

Although it was after two in the morning, he didn’t feel in the least tired. In fact, he felt fantastically alive, and filled with a driving sense of purpose. Although it made more sense to wait until morning, because she would probably be fast asleep at this hour, Leo felt compelled to see her as soon as was physically possible. He didn’t doubt for a single second that she would feel exactly the same way about seeing him.

As expected, her cottage was in complete darkness, but he didn’t hesitate to ring the doorbell, and was slightly surprised, although pleasantly so, when she answered the door within minutes. Nor did she look as though she had been dragged out of bed. In fact, she looked as alert as he felt, which was great.

Leo grinned and stepped forward. ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’

Wake her?
Not much chance of that when she had spent hours replaying in her mind those stolen snippets of revealing conversation which she had overheard before she had fled. No, she had had no more chance of sleeping with so much on her mind than if Daniel had set up camp in her bedroom to play his drums.

Besides, it seemed a moot point whether he had woken her or not, because he was already inserting himself beyond the door, shouldering his way into the cottage.

Heather cravenly wished that he would just disappear, leaving her some more time to sort out in her head what she was going to say to him. When fate decided to play games, she thought, heart beating a frantic tempo, it certainly didn’t cut corners. Leo was the opposite of the disappearing man—he was standing in her hallway, one hundred percent vital, insanely sexy male.

‘I’m glad you came.’ Heather found her voice and made it sound as cool as possible, although her fingers were knotted nervously behind her back as she watched him remove his weatherbeaten, tan leather bomber-jacket and sling it over the banister.

In the cold light of reality, she had taken time to consider his extraordinary marriage proposal. It had been the last thing she had expected, and she was ashamed now at how eagerly she had allowed herself to believe that he had really meant it. Leo had never once talked to her about a future, not even when their relationship had been at its rosiest. In fact, he had been positively scathing about such a concept applied to him and any woman. Nor had he given her any inclination, when she had told him about his mother’s assumptions—when she had
confessed her love
—that he was willing to commit to what they had and give it a fair go to see where it ended up. No, he had been more than willing to walk off into the sunset, leaving her to deal with her broken heart.

She was retrospectively incredulous that she had succumbed to his phoney, soft voice and honeyed words and had actually believed that he had come to some kind of wondrous realisation. She couldn’t now comprehend how she had been so stupid. The man didn’t love her, never had and never would. Really, how on earth could he have come to a wondrous conclusion that he had made a mistake, that he wanted her in his life? Even when he had uttered that preposterous proposal he had significantly failed to say anything about love. She had let herself believe what she’d wanted to believe, and it wouldn’t be the first time she had made that particular mistake around him.

‘We need to talk,’ she told him in a stilted voice, solving the problem of looking at him by turning her back and walking towards her sitting room. She waited as he followed her in, but when he sat down, patting the space next to him, she remained standing by the door until he finally caught her mood and frowned.

‘You are upset because I should have come sooner,’ he said as an apology. ‘There were things that needed to be said between my brother and myself.’

‘Yes. I know.’ Heather swallowed hard. She was so alive to his presence that it hurt. It was like being high up on a mountain where the air was thin and breathing normally was impossible. It was not how she wanted to feel, not now, and she had to make a big effort to keep her voice level and her thoughts as clear as possible.

‘Sometimes,’ he carried on, ‘family situations can take longer than anticipated.’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Is that all you’re going to say? And why are you standing all the way over there by the door when there’s a much more comfortable spot right here next to me?’
Where you belong
, was the unvoiced postscript to that remark, and incredibly he didn’t try and rail against it.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you said, Leo—about marriage—and it doesn’t make any sense.’

Leo’s deep, grey eyes, which could be as cold as slate when he was angry and as dark as coal when he was aroused, swept over her cautiously.

‘You see,’ Heather continued, pushing herself away from the door and sidling sideways, crablike, to collapse onto the chair facing him. ‘I happened to overhear a bit of what you and Alex were talking about.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘I came back; I thought the two of you might want some coffee. The door was open and I heard…stuff.’ The ‘stuff’ had become a jumble of words that had crystallised into a lethally destructive bomb threatening to explode in her head.

‘Stuff that made me realise that you don’t give a jot about me,’ Heather told him. She was hanging on to her self-control, but only by a thread, and if he couldn’t hear the angry tremor in her voice then
she
certainly could. ‘You didn’t ask me to marry you because you had decided that you wanted to build a future with me. You asked me to marry you because Alex was in the room and you felt the need to exercise your rights over a possession. Because there’s a lot of muddy water under your bridge, isn’t there, Leo? Would you ever have told me if I hadn’t found out on my own?’

‘You should not have stood out there listening to a conversation that was private!’ Even as the words left his mouth, Leo was chillingly aware that there were more holes in that line of argument than a colander. Of course she would have listened, probably caught by the mention of her name, or maybe just by the urgency of their voices. She was only human. He felt out of control, and he didn’t like it, but then again when had he felt completely in control since he had met her? He could no longer remember that happy state, nor did he have any inclination to return to it.

‘That’s not the point. The point is…’ She heard the wobble in her voice and took a deep breath. ‘I was just a bit player in a revenge game for you, Leo.’ Big, fat tears were welling up and she swallowed hard.

‘You’re getting hysterical.’

‘I am
not
getting hysterical!’

‘No? Because your voice is getting higher and higher. Why don’t you let me explain?’ A lifetime of self-control made it possible for Leo to outwardly contain all nuance of emotion in his voice, but already he was considering the possibility that one overheard conversation would be the conclusive nail in his coffin, and a thread of panic was beginning to filter in. He wanted to go over to her, close the distance between them, but he knew instinctively that the result would be either fight or flight, and neither was acceptable.

‘Explain what?’ Heather asked him jerkily. ‘How it is that you let your ex-wife destroy the relationship you had with your brother? With your son?’

The silence stretched between them, thick and tense. Heather wondered whether he would say anything. He was a deeply private man, and having her raise the spectre of a past he probably would have preferred to keep under wraps, she half-figured, would make him simply stand up and walk away.

Leo heard the scathing, incredulous criticism in her voice and for the first time in his life he found himself lost for words. The very basic foundation of his life—which was that essentially he didn’t much care one way or another what someone else might think of him—deserted him.

‘What you overheard has nothing to do with you.’

‘How can you say that?’ Heather asked. She stared at the man sitting opposite her and wondered who he was. There was no expression on his face. He wasn’t going to explain anything to her because she just didn’t
matter
enough. Since when should that thought hurt her? she wondered. It wasn’t as though it came as any blinding surprise.

Since when had she ever really mattered to him? Even when he had been covering her body with kisses, touching her in her most intimate places, tasting her in ways that could send her into orbit, he had never let the barriers down. He lived life the way people might play a game of chess, always coolly conscious of needing to make just the right move. Wasn’t that why he was so phenomenally successful in business? Leo did nothing unless it suited him. At that particular point in time, it had suited him to make a big song and dance of claiming her in the most irrefutable way he could think of.

‘Alex and I were having a private conversation,’ Leo said heavily. ‘And one that was perhaps overdue.’

‘ Perhaps?’

‘Sophia destroyed many things, and I allowed it.’ For someone as open and as upfront as she was, she would find these dark secrets abhorrent. But he needed to explain before he could even begin to find out whether he had missed his chance with her, as he knew he probably had. ‘I never questioned what she expected out of me, but I knew very early on that I was failing to deliver—too much time spent at work, not enough interest in going out to clubs or partying. My wife, in short, discovered that the man she married wasn’t the funloving guy she wanted. It escaped her that I needed to work in order to earn the vast sums of money she enjoyed spending.’

‘You don’t have to tell me any of this if you don’t want to,’ Heather said. She was painfully aware that the words were wrenched out of him. While he maybe thought that the very least she deserved was clarification from
his
point of view, of things that had been said, she still shied away from causing him any discomfort. She could feel her tender heart reaching out to him.

Leo looked briefly at her and then vaulted to his feet so that he could pace the small room, a tiger forced to withdraw its claws and leash its primitive urge to dominate. Which made her no less conscious of his immense, restless energy. Even in thoughtful contemplation he still managed to overwhelm his surroundings and make her acutely aware of her fascinated response to his physical impact.

In that single sentence—
you don’t have to tell me any of this if you don’t want to
—Leo thought that he could identify her retreat from him. Why else would she show such little interest in a story that was so revealingly intimate? He hadn’t thought that he had loved her. Hell, who knew what love was? His experiences in that field had been blighted, to say the least. How was he supposed to know, belatedly, that this powerful urge to be with her, the way she had filled his head, had been more than just a passing inconvenience? He had never had a problem compartmentalising women before. How was he supposed to recognise that his inability to do the same with this woman was an indication of feelings that were as alien to him as breathing air was to a fish?

He gave an elegant, casual shrug in the hope that it would conceal his desperation to make her understand.

‘I don’t pretend to have been a saint. I was away more often than I should have been, but returning to the house was like returning to a hell hole. Even after Daniel was born the arguments continued. In fact, they became worse, because added to the general gripe that I didn’t pay her the attention she deserved was her resentment at being housebound. Even with nannies at her disposal her freedom of movement was curtailed, by her standards, and she didn’t like it.’

Having heard only the bare skeleton of her eavesdropped conversation, Heather was silent at this unexpected fleshing out of the detail.

‘Well?’ Leo prompted, because her silence was unnerving. She was a woman who had opinions on just about everything, up to and including things which were outside the boundaries which he had silently but firmly laid down between them.

Heather looked at this clever, complicated, beautiful man who had stolen her heart without even trying, and she did her best not to be utterly transparent.

‘Was that when she…um…?’

‘Decided that an absentee husband wasn’t good enough? Realised that infidelity was just the thing? Began screwing around?’ Leo gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘No idea. The end result was the same, and thrown into that wonderful hotpot was Daniel. She was determined that I not get close to him. I don’t think she could stand the thought that there reached a point when I just didn’t really give a damn about her any longer. I wanted my son, but as far as I was concerned she could have disappeared off the face of the earth. When I told her that I wanted a divorce, she went crazy, and she went even crazier when I didn’t react.’

Heather had no difficulty in imagining the scenario. Leo, at the height of his indifference, was a formidable sight. She shivered. Was this story just a prelude to telling her why he had asked her to marry him? She could feel herself clinging to the miserable hope that he must care something for her if he was going to all this trouble, divulging details he had probably never shared with anyone else in his life before. She firmly squashed the feeling.

‘You know what happened next, don’t you?’ Leo was finally standing in front of her, a towering presence that sucked the breath out of her. Heather nodded slowly, because ‘what happened next’ had been the very first words she had accidentally overheard. Leo dragged the small, upholstered footstool across so that he could perch on it. A big, brawny, muscular man on a dainty pink footstool—it was a comical sight, but the last thing Heather felt like doing was laughing.