Pride & Consequence Omnibus (17 page)

The scent, the sight, the feel of her, her touch against his
body, even the soft, increasingly incoherent sound of her husky, pleading moans,
seemed to strike at a vulnerability inside him that he had never dreamed
existed.

He reached out for her, giving in to the need burning through
him to kiss every delicious woman-scented inch of her, and then to do so all
over again, slowly and thoroughly, until the unsteadiness of her breathing was a
torment to his senses. He finally allowed himself the pleasure of sliding his
fingers through the soft, warm tangle of curls concealing her sex, stroking the
flesh that lay beneath and slowly parting the outer covering of her to caress
her with full intimacy.

She felt soft, hot, moist and so unbelievably delicate that,
ignoring the agonised urging of her voice against his ear, he forced himself to
love her slowly and carefully.

He could feel her body rising up to reach his touch as she
writhed frantically against him, telling him in broken words of open pleasure
that jolted like electricity through his senses just what she wanted from him
and how. She somehow managed to manoeuvre both of them so that he was pushing
urgently against her and then inside her, as though the intimacy was beyond his
own physical control.

She felt. She felt...

Jodi heard the low, visceral male sound he made as he entered
her, filled her, and sharp spirals of intense pleasure flooded her body.

Just hearing that sound, knowing his need, was almost as
erotically exciting as feeling him move inside her. Long, slow, powerful thrusts
lifted and carried her and caused her to reach out for him, drawing him deep
inside her. The pleasure of feeling her body expand to accommodate him was so
indescribably precious that she cried out aloud her joy in it and in him. She
loved this feeling of being wrapped around him, embracing him, holding him,
somehow nurturing and protecting his essential male essence.

Somewhere on the periphery of his awareness, Leo recognised
that there was something that his mind should be aware of, something important
his body was trying to tell him, something about both the intensity of what he
was experiencing and the special, close-fitting intimacy of the tender female
body wrapped around his own. But the age-old urgency of the need now driving him
was short-circuiting his ability to question anything.

All he knew was how good she felt, how right, how essential it
was that he reciprocate the wonderful gift she was giving him by taking them
both to that special place that lay so tantalisingly almost within
reach...another second, another stroke, another heartbeat.

He felt her orgasm gripping her; spasm after spasm of such
vibrant intensity that its sheer strength brought him to his own completion.

As she lay in his arms, her body trembling in the aftershock of
her pleasure, her damp curls a wild tangle of soft silk against his chest, he
heard her gasping shakily, ‘That was wonderful, my wonderful, wonderful
lover.’

And then as he looked down into her eyes she closed them and
fell asleep, with all the speed and innocence of a child.

Broodingly Leo studied her. There was no doubt in his mind that
she was a plant, bought and paid for with Jeremy Driscoll’s money.

And he, idiotic fool that he was, had fallen straight into the
trap that had been set for him. And he suspected, now that he had time to think
things through properly, that this was something more than Jeremy Driscoll
supplying him with a bedmate for the night.

Jeremy was simply not that altruistic. Not altruistic in any
way, shape or form, and Leo knew that he had not mistaken the dislike and envy
in the other man’s eyes earlier in the day. Jeremy knew that he, Leo, was not
about to change his mind. Not unless Jeremy Driscoll believed he had some means
of forcing him to do so.

Now, when it was too late, Leo remembered the newspaper article
Jeremy Driscoll had been reading,

For a man in his position, an unmarried man, the effect of a
public exposé, a woman selling her kiss-and-tell story to one of the national
newspapers, would not be devastating. But Leo would be pilloried as a laughing
stock for being so gullible and, as a result, would lose respect in the business
world. If that happened he would not be able to count on the support and belief
he was used to. No businessman, not even one as successful as Leo, wanted
that.

He got out of bed, giving Jodi a bitter look as he did so. How
could she lie there sleeping so peacefully? As though...as though... Unable to
stop himself, Leo felt his glance slide to her mouth, still curved in a warmly
satisfied smile. Even in her sleep she was somehow managing to maintain the
fiction that what had happened between them was something special. But then no
doubt she was a skilled actress. She would have to be.

The reality of what he had done pushed relentlessly through his
thoughts. His behaviour had been so totally alien that even now he couldn’t
imagine what had possessed him. Or, at least, he could, but he couldn’t
understand how he had allowed it to get so out of control.

Or why he was standing beside the bed and continuing to look at
her, when surely his strongest urge ought to be to go and have a shower as hot
and strong as he could stand until he had washed the feel, the scent, the taste
of her off his body and out of his senses. But for some incomprehensible reason
that was the last thing he wanted to do...

Just in time he managed to stop himself from reaching out to
touch her, to stroke a gentle fingertip along that tender cheekbone and touch
those unbelievably long, dark lashes, that small, straight nose, those soft,
full lips.

As though somehow she sensed what he was thinking, her lips
parted on a sweetly sensual sigh, her mouth curling back into another smile of
remembered pleasure.

What the hell was he doing, letting her sleep there like that?
By rights he ought to wake her up and throw her out. He glanced at the alarm
clock supplied by the hotel. It was two o’clock in the morning, and he told
himself that it was because of his inbred sense of responsibility that he could
not bring himself to do so.

It just wasn’t safe for a woman—any woman, even a woman like
her—to wander about on her own so late at night; anything could happen to
her!

But he wasn’t going to get back in that bed with her. No
way!

Going into the bathroom, he pulled on the complimentary robe
provided by the hotel and then made his way into the sitting room, closing the
bedroom door behind him as he did so and snapping on the light.

The first thing he saw was the almost empty cocktail jug and
the glass Jodi had drunk from.

Grimacing, he pushed it to one side. She had even had the
audacity to order a drink on Room Service. Because she had needed the courage it
would give her to go to bed with him?

He warned himself against falling into the trap of feeling
sorry for her, making excuses for her. She had known exactly what she was
doing... Exactly... He frowned as he moved a little uncomfortably in his
chair.

He was wide awake now and he had some work he could be doing.
When his would-be seducer woke up they were going to need to have a short, sharp
talk.

There was no way he was going to allow Jeremy Driscoll to
blackmail him into backing out of the contract he had made with his
father-in-law.

Still frowning, he reached for his briefcase.

CHAPTER TWO

R
UBBING
HER
EYES
, Jodi grimaced in disgust at the sour taste in her mouth. Her head ached, and her body did too, but they were different sorts of aches; the ache in her body had a subtle but quite distinctly pleasurable undertone to it, whilst the one in her head...

Cautiously she moved it and then wished she had not as a fierce, throbbing pain banged through her temples.

Instinctively she reached across, expecting to find her own familiar bedside table, and then realised that she was not in her own bed.

So where exactly was she? Like wisps of mist, certain vague memories, sounds, images, drifted dangerously across her mind. But no, surely she couldn’t have? Hadn’t! Frantically she looked to the other side of the large bed, the sledgehammer thuds of her heart easing as she saw to her relief that it was empty.

It had been a dream, that was all, a shocking and unacceptable dream. And she couldn’t imagine how or why... But... She froze as she saw the quite unmistakable imprint of another head on the pillow next to her own.

Shivering, she leaned closer to it, stiffening as she caught the alien but somehow all-too-familiar scent of soap and man rising from the pillow.

What had been vague memories were becoming sharper and clearer with every anxious beat of her heart.

It was true! Here in this room. In this bed! She had. Where was he? She looked nervously towards the bathroom door, her attention momentarily distracted by the sight of her own clothes neatly folded on a chair.

Without pausing for logical thought she scrambled out of the bed and hurried towards them, dressing with urgency whilst she kept her gaze fixed on the closed bathroom door.

She longed to be able to shower and clean her teeth, brush her hair, but she simply did not dare to do so. Appallingly explicit memories were now forcing themselves past the splitting pain of her alcohol-induced headache. She couldn’t comprehend how on earth she could have behaved in such a way.

She had been drinking, she reminded herself with disgusted self-contempt. She had been drinking, and whatever had been in that potent cocktail Room Service had sent up to the suite had somehow turned her from the prim and proper virginal woman she was into a...an amorous, sexually aggressive female, who...

Virginal! Jodi’s body froze. Well, she certainly wasn’t that any more! Not that it mattered except for the fact that, driven by her desire, she hadn’t taken any steps to protect her health or to prevent...

Jodi begged fate not to punish her foolishness, praying that there would be no consequences to what she had done other than her own shocked humiliation.

Picking up her handbag, she tiptoed quietly towards the bedroom door.

* * *

Leo was just wondering how long his unwanted guest intended to continue to sleep in
his
bed, and whether or not five a.m. was too early to ring for a room-service breakfast, when Jodi reached for the bedroom door.

Even though his body ached for sleep, he had been furiously determined not to get back into his bed whilst she was in it. One experience of just how vulnerable he was to her particularly effective method of seduction was more than enough.

Even now, having had the best part of three hours of solitude to analyse what had happened, he was still no closer to understanding why he had been unable to stop himself from responding to her, unable to control his desire.

Yes, he had felt that bittersweet pang of attraction when he had first seen her in the hotel foyer, but knowing what she was ought surely to have destroyed that completely.

He tensed as he saw the bedroom door opening.

At first, intent on making her escape, Jodi didn’t see him standing motionlessly in front of the window.

It was light now, the clear, fresh light of an early summer morning, and when she did realise that he was there her face flushed as sweetly pink as the sun-warmed feathers of clouds in the sky beyond the window.

Leo heard her involuntary gasp and saw the quick, despairing glance she gave the main door, her only exit from the suite. Anticipating her actions, he moved towards the door, reaching it before her and standing in front of it, blocking her escape.

As she saw him properly Jodi felt the embarrassed heat possessing her body deepen to a burning, soul-scorching intensity. It was him, the man she had seen in the foyer, the man she had thought so very attractive, the man who had made her have the most extraordinarily uncharacteristic thoughts!

Out of the corner of her eye Jodi could see the coffee-table and the telltale cocktail jug.

‘Yes,’ Leo agreed urbanely. ‘Not only have you illegally entered my suite, but you also had the gall to run up a room-service bill. Do you intend to pay personally for the use of my bed and the bar, or would you prefer me to send the bills to Jeremy Driscoll?’

Jodi, who had been staring in mute distress at the cocktail jug, turned her head automatically to look at him as she heard the familiar name of her least favourite fellow villager.

‘Jeremy?’ she questioned uncertainly.

Jeremy Driscoll’s father-in-law might own the local factory, and Jeremy himself might run it, but that did not make him well-liked in the locale. He had a reputation for underhand behaviour, and for attempting to bring in certain cost-cutting and potentially dangerous practices, which thankfully had been blocked by the workers’ union and the health and safety authority.

But what he had to do with her present humiliating situation Jodi had no idea at all.

‘Yes. Jeremy,’ Leo confirmed, unkindly imitating the anxious tremor in her voice. ‘I know exactly what’s going on,’ he continued acidly. ‘And why you’re here. But if you think for one minute that I’m going to allow myself to be blackmailed into giving in...’

Jodi swallowed uncomfortably against the tight ball of self-recrimination and shame that was lodged in her throat.

Did Leo Jefferson—it had to be him—really think that she was the kind of person who would behave in such a way? His use of the word ‘blackmail’ had particularly shocked her. But was the truth any easier for her to bear, never mind admit to someone else? Was it really any more palatable to have to say that she had been so drunk—albeit by accident—that she simply had not known what she was doing?

To have gone to bed with a complete stranger, to have done the things she had done with him, and, even worse, wanted the things she had wanted with him... A woman in her position, responsible for the shaping and guiding of young minds...

Jodi shuddered to think of how some of the parents of her pupils, not to mention the school’s board of governors, might view her behaviour.

‘Well, you can go back to your paymaster,’ Leo Jefferson was telling her with cold venom, ‘and you can tell him, whilst you might have given me good value for his money, it makes not one jot of difference to my plans. I still have no intention of cancelling the contract and allowing him to buy back the business.

‘I have no idea what he hoped to achieve by paying you to have sex with me,’ Leo continued grimly and untruthfully. ‘But all he gave me was a night of passably good if somewhat over-professionalised sex. If he thinks he can use that against me in some way...’ Leo shrugged to underline his indifference whilst discreetly watching Jodi to see how she was reacting to his fabricated insouciance.

She had gone very pale, and there was a look in her eyes that under other circumstances Leo might almost have described as haunted.

Jodi fought to control her spiralling confusion and to make sense out of what Leo Jefferson was saying. She was going to avoid thinking about his cruelly insulting personal comments right now. They were the kind of thing she could only allow herself to examine in private. But his references to Jeremy Driscoll and her own supposed connection with him were totally baffling.

She opened her mouth to say as much, but before she could do so Leo was exclaiming tersely, ‘I don’t know who you are or why you can’t find a less self-destructive way of earning a living.’

Ignoring the latter part of his comment, Jodi pounced with shaky relief on his ‘I don’t know who you are’.

If he didn’t know who she was, she certainly wasn’t going to enlighten him. With any luck she might, please fate, be able to salvage her pride and her public reputation with a damage-limitation exercise that meant no one other than the two of them need ever know what had happened.

She had abandoned any thought of pursuing her real purpose in seeking him out. How on earth could she plead with him for her school’s future now? Another burden of sickening guilt joined the one already oppressing her. She had not just let herself down, and her standards, she had let the school and her pupils down as well. And she still couldn’t fully understand how it had all happened. Yes, she had had too much to drink, but surely that alone...

Cringing, she reflected on her reaction to Leo Jefferson when she had seen him walking across the hotel foyer the previous evening. Then, of course, she had not known who he was. Only that...only that she found him attractive...

She felt numbed by the sheer unacceptability of what she had done, shamed and filled with the bleakest sense of disbelief and despair.

* * *

Her lack of any response and her continued silence were just a ploy she was using as a form of gamesmanship, Leo decided as he watched her, and as for that anguished shock he had seen earlier in her eyes, well, as he had good cause to know, she was an extremely accomplished performer!

‘I have to go. Please let me past.’

The soft huskiness of her voice reminded Leo of the way she had moaned her desire to him during the night. What the hell was the matter with him? He couldn’t possibly still want her!

Even though he had made no move to stand away from the door, Jodi walked towards it as determinedly as she could. She had, she reminded herself, faced a whole roomful of disruptive teenage pupils of both sexes during her teacher training without betraying her inner fear. Surely she could outface one mere man? Only somehow the use of the word ‘mere’ in connection with this particular man brought a mirthless bubble of painful laughter to her throat.

This man could never be a ‘mere’ anything. This man...

She had guts, Leo acknowledged as she stared calmly past him, but then no doubt her chosen profession would mean that she was no stranger to the art of making a judicious exit.

It went against everything he believed in to forcibly constrain her, even though he was loath to let her go without reinforcing just what he thought of her and the man who was paying her.

Another second and she would have been so close to him that they would almost have been body to body, Jodi recognised on a mute shudder of distress as Leo finally allowed her access to the door. Expelling a shaky, pent-up breath of relief, she reached for the handle.

Leo waited until she had turned it before reminding her grimly, ‘Driscoll might think this was a clever move, but you can tell him from me that it wasn’t. Oh, and just a word of warning for you personally: any attempt to publicise what happened between us last night and I can promise you that any ridicule I suffer you will suffer ten times more.’

Jodi didn’t speak. She couldn’t. This was the most painful, the most shameful experience she had ever had or ever wanted to have.

But it seemed that Leo Jefferson still hadn’t finished with her, because as she stepped out into the hotel corridor he took hold of the door, placing his hand over hers in a grip that was like a volt of savage male electricity burning through her body.

‘Of course, if you’d been really clever you could have sold your story where it would have gained you the highest price already.’

Jodi couldn’t help herself; even though it was the last thing she wanted to do, she heard herself demanding gruffly, ‘What...what do you mean?’

The cynically satisfied smile he gave her made her shudder.

‘What I mean is that I’m surprised you haven’t tried to bargain a higher price for your silence from me than the price Driscoll paid you for your services.’

Jodi couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

‘I don’t...I didn’t...’ She began to defend herself instinctively, before shaking her head and telling him fiercely, ‘There isn’t any amount of money that could compensate me for what...what I experienced last night.’ And then, before he could say or do anything more to hurt her, she managed to wrench her hand from his and run down the corridor towards the waiting lift.

A girl wearing the uniform of a member of the hotel staff paused to look at her as Jodi left Leo’s suite, but Jodi was too engrossed in her thoughts to notice her.

Leo watched her go in furious disbelief. Just how much of a fool did she take him for, throwing out a bad Victorian line like that? And as for what she had implied, well, his body had certain very telltale marks on it that told a very different story indeed!

* * *

To Jodi’s relief, no one gave her a second glance as she hurried through the hotel foyer, heading for the exit. No doubt they were used to guests coming and going all the time.

‘Stop thinking about it,’ she advised herself as she stepped out into the bright morning sunlight, blinking a little in its brilliance.

The first thing she was going to do when she got home, Jodi decided as she drove out onto the main road, was have a shower, and the second was to compose the letter she would send to Leo Jefferson, putting to him the case for allowing the factory to remain open—there was no way she was going to try to make any kind of personal contact with him now!

And the third: the third was to go to bed and catch up on her sleep, and very firmly put what had happened between them out of her mind, consign it to a locked and deeply buried part of her memory that could never be accessed again by anyone!

* * *

Jodi opened the front door to her small cottage, one of a row of eight, built in the eighteenth century, with tiny, picturesque front gardens overlooking the village street and much longer lawns at the rear. After carefully locking up behind her she made her way upstairs.