by Penny Jordan
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 judicial 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.
It was the sound of her telephone ringing that finally woke her; groggily she reached for the receiver, appalled to see from her watch that it was gone ten o’clock. Normally at this time on a Saturday morning she would be in their local town, doing her weekly supermarket shop before meeting up with friends for lunch.
As luck would have it, she had made no such arrangement for today, as most of her friends were away on holiday with their families.
As her fingers curled round the telephone receiver her stomach muscles tensed, despite the fact that she knew it was impossible that her caller could be Leo Jefferson; after all, he didn’t even know who she was, thank goodness! A small frisson of nervous excitement tingled through her body, quickly followed by a strong surge of something she would not allow herself to acknowledge as disappointment when she recognised her cousin Nigel’s voice.
It was no wonder, after all she had been through, that her emotions should be so traumatised that they had difficulty in relaying appropriate reactions to her.
‘At last,’ she could hear Nigel saying cheerfully to her. ‘This is the third time I’ve rung. How did it go with Leo Jefferson? I’m dying to know.’
Jodi took a deep breath; she could feel her heart starting to pound as shame and guilt filled her. The hand holding the receiver felt sticky. She had never been a good liar; never been even a vaguely adequate one.
‘It didn’t,’ she admitted huskily.
‘You chickened out?’ Nigel guessed.
Jodi let out a sigh of relief; Nigel had just given her the perfect answer to her dilemma.
‘I…I was tired and I started to have second thoughts. And—’
Before she could tell Nigel that she had decided to write to Leo Jefferson rather than speak with him her cousin had cut across her to say tolerantly, ‘I thought you wouldn’t go through with it. Never mind. Uncle Nigel has ridden to the rescue for you. My boss has invited me over to dinner tonight, and I’ve asked him if I can take you along with me. He’ll be speaking to Leo Jefferson himself next week, and if you put your case to him I’m sure he’ll incorporate the plight of the school into his own discussion.’
‘Oh, Nigel, that’s very kind of you, but I don’t think…’ Jodi began to demur. She just wasn’t in the mood for a dinner party, and as for the idea of putting the school’s case to Nigel’s boss, who was the chief planning officer for the are
a, Jodi’s opinion of her own credibility had been so undermined that she just didn’t feel good enough about herself to do so.
Nigel, though, made it clear that he was not prepared to take no for an answer.
‘You’ve got to come,’ he insisted. ‘Graham really does want to meet you. His grandson is one of your pupils, apparently, and he’s a big fan of yours. The grandson, not Graham. Although…’
‘Nigel, I can’t go,’ Jodi protested.
‘Of course you can. You must. Think of your school,’ he teased her before adding, ‘I’m picking you up at half-past seven, and you’d better be ready.’
He had rung off before Jodi could protest any further.
Wearily Jodi studied the screen of her computer. She had spent most of the afternoon trying to compose a letter to send to Leo Jefferson. The headache she had woken up with had, thankfully, finally abated, but every time she tried to concentrate on what she was supposed to be doing a totally unwanted mental picture of Leo Jefferson kept forming inside her head. And it wasn’t just his face that her memory was portraying to her in intimate detail, she acknowledged as she felt herself turning as pink as the cascading petunias in her next-door neighbour’s window boxes. Mrs Fields, at eighty, was still a keen gardener, and as she had ruefully explained to Jodi she liked the strong, bright colours because she could see them.
Jodi’s own lovingly planted boxes were a more subtle combination of soft greens, white and silver, the same silver as Leo Jefferson’s sexy eyes.
Jodi’s face flamed even hotter as she stared at her screen and realised that she had begun her letter, ‘Dear Sexy Eyes’.
Quickly she deleted the words and began again, reminding herself of how important it was that she impress on Leo Jefferson the effect the closure of the factory would have not just on her school but also on the whole community.
All over the country small villages were dying or becoming weekend dormitories for city workers, although everyone here in their local community had worked hard to make theirs a living, working village.