Pride & Consequence Omnibus (22 page)

‘I want a bath...and some clean clothes,’ Jodi told him in a voice she barely recognised as her own.

‘The bath I can provide; the clothes we shall have to collect from your house on the way to mine,’ Leo replied promptly.

‘Yours!’ Jodi’s forehead creased as she allowed Leo to fasten the passenger seat belt around her. ‘But I want to go to my own home.’

‘You can’t, I’m afraid,’ Leo told her. ‘The sergeant released you into my care, remember, and I have to produce you at the station in the morning.’

‘But I can’t stay with you,’ Jodi protested.

‘I’m sorry, Jodi.’ Leo’s voice was unexpectedly kind. ‘You have to.’

‘I didn’t really assault Jeremy.’ Jodi tried to defend herself. ‘He was the one...’ She stopped and bit her lip, her stomach clenching on a leap of nervous shock as she saw the ferocity in Leo’s eyes as he turned to study her.

‘If he hurt you... Did he, Jodi?’

When she looked away from him Leo cursed himself for the intensity of his own reaction. He had quite plainly shocked and frightened her, and she had already been frightened more than enough for one night.

‘I thought the demonstration was supposed to be a peaceful one,’ he commented as he drove back towards the village.

‘It was,’ Jodi acknowledged. ‘But Jeremy was very confrontational and somehow things got out of hand. Is it true that he’s being investigated?’

‘Yes,’ Leo told her briefly, ‘but I shouldn’t really have said so, I don’t suppose.’

When they reached her cottage he insisted on going inside with her and waiting until she had packed a small case of necessities, and Jodi felt too disorientated to be able to have the strength to resist.

Jeremy Driscoll’s manner towards her had left her feeling vulnerable, and she couldn’t help remembering how when she had won her battle with him to retain the playing field for the school he had threatened to get even with her. He was a vengeful and dangerous man, and for tonight at least, loath though she was to admit it, she knew she would feel far safer sleeping under Leo Jefferson’s roof than under her own.

CHAPTER SIX

‘W
HEN
WAS
THE
last time you had something to eat?’

Leo’s prosaic question as he unlocked his front door and ushered Jodi into the hallway of the house made her give him an uncertain look.

She had been steeling herself for, if not his hostility, then certainly some sharply incisive questions. The fact that he seemed more worried about her personal welfare than anything else was thoroughly disconcerting—but nowhere near as disconcerting as the relief and sense of security it had given her to have him take charge in the way that he had done.

‘Lunchtime.’ She answered his question on autopilot, whilst most of her attention was given to what she was feeling at a much deeper level. ‘But I’m not hungry.’

‘That’s because you’re still in shock,’ Leo told her gently. ‘The kitchen is this way.’

At any other time Jodi knew that she would have been fascinated to see the inside of the house she had admired so much, but right now she felt as though her ability to take in anything was overwhelmed by the events of the evening.

As Leo had suggested, she suspected that she was suffering from shock. Otherwise, why would she be so apathetically allowing Leo to make all her decisions for her? She let him guide her firmly to a kitchen chair and urge her into it, whilst he busied himself opening cupboards and then the fridge door, insisting that the light supper he was going to make them both would help her to sleep.

‘Which reminds me,’ he added several minutes later as he served her with an impressively light plate of scrambled eggs, ‘I’m afraid that you will have to sleep in my bedroom, since it’s the only one that’s properly furnished at the moment; I can sleep downstairs on a sofa.’

‘No,’ Jodi protested immediately, praying that he wouldn’t guess the reason for the hot colour suddenly burning her face. The very thought of sleeping in his bed was bringing back memories she had no wish to have surfacing at any time, but most especially when the man responsible for them was seated opposite her.

To her consternation, Leo shook his head at her instinctive refusal, telling her calmly, ‘It’s all right, I can guess what you must be thinking, but you don’t need to worry.’

Jodi tensed. How could he possibly know what she was thinking? And if he really did then how dared he treat it and her as though...?

As she tried to gather her thoughts into a logical enough order to challenge him she heard him continuing, ‘The cleaning team came today, and they will have changed the bed linen.’

Jodi almost choked on her scrambled eggs as relief flooded through her. He hadn’t realised what she was thinking after all; hadn’t realised just what piercingly sensual and shocking images the mention of his bed had aroused for her.

But at least his comments had given her time to gain some control of her thoughts, and for her to remember that she was supposed to be a sensible, mature adult.

‘I can’t possibly take your bed,’ she informed Leo in what she hoped was a cool and businesslike voice.

‘Why not?’ Leo demanded, giving her a quizzical look, and then threw her into complete turmoil as he reminded her softly, ‘After all, it isn’t as though you haven’t done so before.’

As the blood left her face and then rushed back to it in a wave of bright pink Jodi felt her hand trembling so much that she had to grip the mug of tea Leo had given her with both hands to prevent herself from spilling its contents.

She knew that she was overreacting, but somehow she just couldn’t stop herself.

Leo’s teasing comment had not just embarrassed her, it had left her feeling humiliated as well, Jodi recognised as she felt the unwanted prick of her tears threatening to expose her vulnerability to him.

But even as she struggled fiercely to blink them away, Leo was already apologising.

‘I’m sorry,’ he offered. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’ Leo paused, watching her, mentally berating himself for offending her. It amazed him how much discovering that he had been wrong in his earlier assessment of the situation had changed what he felt about her.

The last thing he wanted to do was to hurt her in any way, but there were still certain issues they needed to address—together—and, although he had not deliberately tried to lead up to them, now that the subject had been introduced perhaps he should seize the opportunity to discuss his concerns with her.

‘I know that this perhaps isn’t the best time in the world to say this,’ he began quietly, ‘but we really do need to talk, Jodi...’

Unsteadily Jodi put her mug down on the table.

‘Is that why you brought me here?’ she demanded as fiercely as she could. ‘So that you could cross-examine me? If you think for one minute that just because you saved me from a night in prison I am going to repay you by betraying the others involved in the demonstration, I’m afraid you’d better take me back to the station right now—’

‘Jodi.’ Leo interrupted her passionate tirade as gently as he could. ‘I don’t want to talk to you about the problems at the factory, or the demonstration.’

As he watched her eyes shadow with suspicion Leo wondered what she would say if he was to tell her that right now there was only one person and one problem on his mind, and that was her!

‘I’ve already arranged a meeting with representatives of the factory workforce for tomorrow, when I intend to discuss my proposals for the future of the factory with them,’ he told her calmly.

‘Yes, I heard.’ Jodi suddenly felt totally exhausted, drained to the point where simply to think was a superhuman effort. ‘Then what did you want to talk to me about?’ she asked him warily.

Leo could see how tired she looked and he berated himself for his selfishness. She was still in shock. She needed to rest and recuperate, not be plagued by questions.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he told her gently. ‘Look, why don’t you go to bed? You look completely done in...’ Leo reached out to help her out of the chair.

Sensing that he was about to touch her, Jodi felt her defences leap into action, knowing all too well just how vulnerable she was likely to be to any kind of physical contact with him right now. She sprang up out of the chair, almost stumbling in her haste to avoid contact with him, and in doing so precipitated the very thing she had been so desperate to prevent. As Leo reached out to steady her his hands grasped her arms. As he took the weight of her fall against his body he closed the distance between them.

It was just a week since she had first seen him, a handful of days, that was all, so how on earth could it be that she was reacting to him as though she was starving for physical contact as though the sudden feel of him against her answered a craving that nothing else could hope to appease?

It was as if just the act of leaning against him fulfilled and completed her, made her feel whole again, made her feel both incredibly strong and helplessly weak. She felt that she had found the purpose in life for which she had been created and yet at the same time she hated herself for her neediness.

Mutely she pushed against his chest, demanding her release. Leo obeyed the demand of her body language, asking her gruffly, ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Jodi responded as she stepped back from him and turned away, ducking into the shadows so that he couldn’t see the aching hunger in her expression.

How had things possibly come to this? How had she come to this? Where had her feelings come from? They were totally alien in their intensity and their ferocity.

Leo held the kitchen door open for her. Shakily she walked out into the hallway.

Leo accompanied her to the bottom of the stairs. Jodi began to climb them, her heart bumping heavily against the wall of her chest. She dared not look at Leo, dared not do anything that might betray to him how she was feeling.

‘It’s the second door on the left along the landing,’ she could hear him telling her. ‘You’ll find clean towels and everything in the bathroom. I’ll go and get your bag for you and leave it outside the bedroom door.’

He was telling her as plainly as though he had used the words themselves that she need not fear a repetition of what had happened in his hotel bedroom, Jodi recognised. Which was surely very thoughtful and gentlemanly of him. So why wasn’t she feeling more appreciative, more relieved? Why was she, to be blunt about it, actually feeling disappointed?

Wearily Jodi made her way to the top of the stairs.

As he stood watching the tiredness with which she moved Leo ached to be able to go after her, gather her up protectively in his arms. He deliberately forced himself to turn round and go out to the car to bring in Jodi’s bag.

The look of confusion and despair he had seen on her face in the police station had prompted him into a course of action he now recognised as riven with potential hazards.

When he returned with Jodi’s bag he took it upstairs, knocked briefly outside his closed bedroom door and went straight back downstairs again, shutting himself in the sitting room.

Jodi was standing staring out of the bedroom window when she heard Leo’s knock. She deliberately made herself count to ten—very slowly—before going to open the door, and then told herself that she was relieved and not disappointed to find that the landing was empty and there was no sign of Leo.

Both the bedroom and the bathroom adjoining it were furnished so impersonally that they might almost have been hotel rooms; but thinking of hotel rooms in connection with Leo aroused thoughts and feelings for her that were far from impersonal. Jodi hastily tried to divert her thoughts to less dangerous channels as she went into the bathroom and prepared for bed.

Now that she was on her own she knew that she ought to be thinking about the morning and the possibility of having to face the charges that Jeremy Driscoll had threatened to bring against her—a daunting prospect indeed, but somehow nowhere near as daunting as having to acknowledge just how strong her feelings for Leo were.

That comment he had made to her earlier about her previous appropriation of his bed!

It had made her feel embarrassed and even humiliated, yes, but it had made her remember how wildly wonderful it had felt—she had felt—to be there in his arms. In his life? But she wasn’t in his life, and he wasn’t in hers, not really. All they had done was have sex together, and every woman—even a schoolteacher—knew that for men the act of sex could be enjoyed with less emotional involvement than they might feel consuming a bar of chocolate—nice at the time but quickly forgotten.

She crawled into Leo’s bed—totally sober this time! The bed smelled of clean, fresh linen, as anonymous and bereft of any tangible sign of Leo as the room itself. Curling up in the centre of the large bed, she closed her eyes, but despite her exhaustion sleep evaded her.

She was almost too overtired to sleep, she recognised, the anxieties filling her thoughts, refusing to allow her to relax. She closed her eyes and started to breathe slowly and deeply.

* * *

Downstairs, Leo was finding sleep equally hard to come by. He had work to do that could have occupied his time and his thoughts, but instead he found that he was pacing the sitting-room floor, thinking about Jodi. Worrying about Jodi, and not just because he had now realised just what an awkward situation they could both be in because of their shared night together.

That bruise on her arm caused by Jeremy Driscoll had made him feel as though he could quite happily have torn the other man limb from limb and disposed of his carcass to the nearest hungry carnivore. The mere thought of him even touching Jodi...

Abruptly he stopped pacing. What the devil was happening to him? Did he really need to ask that? he mocked himself inwardly. He was in love. This was love. He was transformed into a man he could barely recognise. A man who behaved and thought illogically, a man driven by his emotions, a man who right now...

He froze as he heard a sound from upstairs, and then strode towards the door, wrenching it open just in time to hear it again, a high-pitched sound of female misery.

Leo took the stairs two at a time, flinging open the bedroom door and striding across the floor to where Jodi lay in the middle of the bed.

She was awake; in the darkness he could see her eyes shining, but she was lying as silently still as though she dared not breathe, never mind move.

‘Jodi, what is it?’ he demanded.

A wash of shaky relief sluiced through Jodi as she heard and recognised Leo’s voice. She had been dreaming about Jeremy Driscoll. A most awful dream, full of appalling and nameless nightmare terrors. It had been the sound of her own muffled scream of sheer panic that had woken her, and for a couple of heartbeats after Leo had thrown open the bedroom door she had actually believed that he was Jeremy.

Now, though, the sound of his voice had reassured her, banishing the nightmare completely.

Too relieved to think of anything else other than the fact that he had rescued her from the terror which had been pursuing her, she turned towards him, telling him, ‘I was having the most horrid dream...about Jeremy Driscoll...’

Just saying his name was still enough to make her shudder violently as she struggled to sit up so that she could talk properly to Leo, who was now leaning over the bed towards her.

She could see the anxiety in his eyes now that her own had accustomed themselves to the night-time shadows of the room, their darkness softened by the summer moonlight outside.

‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you.’ She began to apologise and then checked as she saw that he was still fully dressed.

Was the sitting-room sofa so uncomfortable that he hadn’t even bothered trying to sleep on it, or did the fact that he still had his clothes on have something to do with her presence here in his house? Was he afraid that she might try to seduce him a second time?

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

The speed with which he had read her expression caught Jodi off guard. Her defences, already overloaded by the events of the day, gave up on her completely.

‘You’re still dressed,’ she told him in a low voice. ‘You haven’t been to bed; if that’s because—’