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  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.

  ‘I wasn’t sure whether you would wait for me,’ he said once they were on their way to the hospital. ‘And if I embarrassed you back then, please accept my humble apologies.’

  Heather looked at him suspiciously out of the corner of her eye. ‘Contrite’ wasn’t an adjective she would have associated with him.

  ‘You seem very nervous when you’re around me—and I just want you to know,’ Leo continued with a remorselessly pious voice, while he watched with fascination the transparent play of emotions on her face, ‘that you have nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘Afraid? I’m not afraid.’

  ‘No, maybe that’s the wrong word. Tense. There’s no need to feel tense when you’re around me. Let’s not lose sight of the main thing here, which is my mother. I see you’re taking her a few books.’

  Heather relaxed. Her imagination had gone into overdrive a bit earlier on, but she was coming back down to earth as she stared straight ahead and chatted to him about Katherine’s progress. The operation had been a success, but she was still immobile and beginning to get bored. She was an avid reader, Heather said, hence the selection of books.

  ‘She’s particularly fond of travel books,’ Heather told him. ‘I think it makes her think of your brother, which is something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.’ With the busy hospital car-park now in sight, she was pleased with herself that she had managed to sustain a running conversation with Leo about nothing much in particular. There seemed to be a great black hole of missing information when it came to his mother, and he was either a very good actor or else he was genuinely interested in filling in some of the gaps which had hitherto existed.

  ‘What about my brother?’ Leo’s mouth tightened but he kept his voice neutral.

  ‘Do you know how to get in touch with him?’

  ‘I fail to see where you’re going with this.’

  Heather glanced at him, surprised at the unwelcoming response. ‘Don’t you think that he should know about Katherine’s fall?’ This innocent question was greeted with stunning silence as Leo began driving slowly through the cluttered car-park, looking for a free space and complaining about the incompetence of the council, which had closed off a section of the car-park for repair work which appeared to be at a complete standstill.

  ‘Aren’t you going to give me a lecture about the virtues of public transport at this point?’ he asked, neatly backing his car into a space which left them just about enough room to wriggle out. ‘Or at least the perils of being seduced into buying cars that are too big to be useful? Maybe a sermon about the curse of the workaholic and the amount of time they waste trying to make money to buy things that aren’t essential?’

  After what had been a fraught-free drive to the hospital, Heather was confused at the sudden cool mockery in Leo’s voice. Where had that come from?

  ‘I don’t care what you choose to spend your money on. It can’t buy happiness.’

  ‘There are times when you are a walking, breathing cliché, do you know that?’

  ‘Why can’t you be nice for longer than five seconds?�
� Heather snapped, glaring at him over the hood of his sleek car before slamming the door shut. ‘One minute you’re apologising for embarrassing me, and the next minute you’re trying to start an argument for no good reason! I was just asking…’

  ‘There’s no need to drag my brother into this,’ Leo told her abruptly, raking his fingers through his hair. ‘Not that anyone is that certain of his whereabouts.’

  ‘Your mother must know where he is,’ Heather persisted. ‘And wouldn’t it be only fair to fill him in? Of course, if he’s halfway across the world there’s no need for him to head back to England, but he deserves to know.’

  ‘This is not a matter open to discussion.’

  ‘Your mother might disagree with that.’

  Leo, striding towards the hospital entrance, swung round to face her.

  She was staring up at him, hands planted firmly on her hips, her mouth pursed in angry defiance.

  This was what turned him on and drove him nuts in equal measure. Driven by a sense of frustration, Leo reached out and pulled her angrily towards him, catching her by surprise so that she tumbled into him, her body soft and unresistant because she had had no time to shove him away.

  There was nothing tender about the savage assault of his mouth against hers. He curled his long fingers into her hair and, although she was too stunned to put up much of a fight, he still drew her fiercely against him.

  In that moment of complete shock, Heather felt her whole body go up in flames. It was as if a match had been struck inside her and had found that her defences, instead of being iron clad, were made of tinder.

  Her lips parted wordlessly to accept his questing, urgent tongue. She heard herself give a soft moan. They were standing to one side, but she was still vaguely aware of people walking past them. Frankly, she couldn’t have cared less what sort of spectacle they were making.

  Her breasts were tender, crushed against his chest, and the abrasive rub of her bra against her nipples was sending tingling sensations all through her body, down to where a honeyed dampness had her aching for more.

  When he tore himself away, it was like being hit suddenly by a cold breeze. She had a few seconds of realising that she actually missed having his arms around her. The silence between them seemed to stretch into eternity, and he wasn’t looking at her. It didn’t take the IQ of a genius to realise that he had come to his senses—which was more than she had done—and was already regretting his lapse in judgement.

  ‘How dare you?’ Heather struggled to hang on to her dignity, but her belated outrage withered away under his look of incredulity.

  ‘Spare me the protest,’ Leo told her. A group of people weaved around them and he pulled her further to one side. No, this was definitely not how things were supposed to happen. ‘I didn’t notice you turning away in revulsion. In fact, just the opposite—but then we both know what’s going on here, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes! We’re on our way to pay a visit to your mother and we—we made a bit of a mistake along the way…’ She had the grace to blush. ‘You kissed me, and…’

  ‘You’re going to have to stop doing that, you know.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Pretending that you’re the innocent victim. It just doesn’t sit well with the truth. Fact is, if we hadn’t been here then there’s no telling where we would have ended up.’

  ‘Nowhere! I’ve already told you how I feel about you, how I feel about relationships.’

  ‘I know. At great length. But it seems to me that your body’s telling a different story.’

  ‘I never said that I didn’t find you an attractive specimen.’ She liked the use of that word. It distanced her from the living, breathing, sexy, red-blooded male staring at her.

  Leo cocked his head to one side and continued to look at her. In an ideal world—the one in which he played the starring role as the man destined to get precisely what he wanted and exactly in the manner in which he wanted it—there would have been dimmed lighting, an atmosphere of crackling, electric tension, the kind of tension that precedes inevitable surrender. She would have come to him, unable to resist her urges, melted into him and maybe, just maybe, he would have asked her to tell him just how much she wanted him.

  Unfortunately the situation was hardly ideal. They were standing outside the hospital. There were people all around them, and the overhead sun was just about as far away from dimmed lighting as it was possible to get.

  She also, crucially, had not come to him. She might not have been able to resist those urges of hers, but the stark truth of it was that she was backing away now at a rate of knots. Leo was left wondering how the hell he had lost control of the situation yet again.

  He had wanted to shut her up. The subject of his brother was off limits, and the desire to put it to rest had resulted in…

  ‘Oh, I know that much,’ he said softly. ‘The little pretence you’re hiding behind is that you can turn your attraction on and off like a tap.’

  ‘We should go inside. Put that little lapse behind us.’

  ‘Again.’

  Heather flushed uncomfortably. Again. The softly spoken word dropped like a toxic rock into a still lake. She could feel the consequences rippling out.

  ‘Okay. Again.’ It took a lot of will power to meet his eyes when actually she wanted to duck inside the building and pretend that kiss had never taken place. Again.

  ‘So what are you trying to say?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Leo shrugged and squinted against the sun. Twice he had felt the vibration of his mobile inside his pocket, twice he had chosen to ignore it. Playing truant definitely had its upside.

  Although he was not looking at her—in fact, making sure not to look at her—he knew the female species intimately enough to know that this was a woman in the process of questioning herself, a woman on the edge of surrender, and the thought of that gave him an unbelievable high.

  ‘Shall we go in? It’s pretty hot out here.’

  That was it, the sum total of his response?

  Katherine was very upbeat, but for the entire time they were there Heather was unable to relax. Her eyes kept drifting to Leo—the way he sat, the way he crossed his legs, walked towards the window—everything.

  By the time they finally left, she felt shattered. She had meant to talk to Katherine about Alex, about whether she wanted him to know about the fall—because whether her son was told about the accident was her decision, and not Leo’s—but in any event it never crossed her mind, which was far too busy thinking about other things.

  It seemed ironic that when Leo had made that pass at her, had invited her into his bed, she had stoutly refused to have anything to do with the idea, had climbed onto her podium and made her feelings known loud and clear, had dispatched him with the ringing assertion that she was far too sensible to indulge in something for the wrong reasons.

  She had just about managed to hold on to the notion that that one kiss had been an aberration.

  This time, she knew what she had felt, and she knew that she had wanted much more. There was no way that she could hide behind the guise of the blushing fair maiden taken advantage of by the devil in disguise.

  And now, Leo was far from interested in talking about anything. He might have kissed her, but it hadn’t been a kiss of encouragement. He had been angry and frustrated with her, and his kiss had reflected that, it had been hard and punishing, and she had still clung to him like a limpet. She believed that she had actually moaned at one point.

  ‘So…’ she began hesitantly, once inside his car. ‘Do you want to talk about what happened back then?’

  Leo’s brow knitted into a frown. ‘What happened back then…?’

  ‘You know.’ He obviously had no idea what she was on about. ‘You kissed me.’

  ‘I thought we’d covered that subject.’ Leo glanced across at her. ‘Made a mistake, didn’t make a mistake…There’s just so much conversation two people can have on the subject of a kiss. We’re not talking a national ca
tastrophe here, Heather.’

  She pursed her lips and stared straight ahead. Leo, focused on the road, couldn’t see her expression, but he didn’t have to. She had been thrown off-balance and this time she was finding it a little more difficult to dismiss. She couldn’t duck and dive behind some phoney rubbish about being the horrified victim, and she couldn’t even pretend that she had been caught off-guard and had therefore been the reluctant participant before coming to her senses. The lady had been his for the taking. But he wasn’t going to indulge her very female need to discuss it to death, possibly to the point where she decided that flight, yet again, was the preferred response.

  ‘No,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘We need to sort out the practicalities of what happens now,’ he told her smoothly.

  For a few seconds, Heather thought that he was talking about them. She felt a sickening lurch inside her as she realised that she wanted to talk about them, that she wanted to be persuaded to abandon every principle she had held dear for all these years, because her attraction to the wretched, inappropriate, totally unsuitable man was just too overwhelming.

  When Heather had met Brian as a teenager she had been attracted to him, but it had been a girlish crush which had morphed over time into a relationship. Yes, she had always known that he was an attractive man, but she had never felt physically out of control when she had been around him. Leo did that to her. She didn’t like it, but she could no longer deny it.

  ‘Practicalities?’ she asked faintly and he spared her another sidelong glance.

  ‘Daniel?’

  ‘Oh, right. Yes. Sure.’ Heather sternly marshalled her thoughts. ‘Well, what’s there to discuss? I mean, of course I’ll be around if you need me at all, but I guess now that you’ve decided to adopt a hands-on approach to the situation it’s pretty much sorted. Daniel sometimes trots over so that I can help him with some of his homework, and I don’t mind that, especially if you’re busy…’