by Penny Jordan
CHAPTER FIVE
LEO frowned as he heard the sound of someone walking along the footpath that skirted round the boundary to Ashton House. He had moved in officially that morning, having organised a cleaning team to go through the house ahead of him. He was now exploring the garden and coming to the conclusion that it was going to take a dedicated team of gardeners to restore it to anything like its former glory.
He had spent the last few days in London, locked in a variety of meetings concerning both his acquisition of the factories and their future. And now it seemed the authorities wanted to open enquiries into the financial workings of the Frampton factory, in particular whilst it had been under Jeremy Driscoll’s management.
If he did decide to keep the factory going he would first of all need to make a decision about what to do with the other sites.
One of them housed the oldest factory, with an out-of-date production line and a depleted workforce, and was a natural choice to be closed down.
Of the other three…if he opted to keep Frampton in production he would have to either sell off the factory adjacent to the motorway system or change its usage to that of a distribution unit.
If he did that…Leo tensed as the walker drew level with the gate in his walled garden that gave on to the path, and he had a clear view of her.
Jodi Marsh!
Jodi saw Leo at exactly the same time as he saw her. The sight of him froze her in her tracks. What was Leo Jefferson doing in the garden of Ashton House? Her house. The house she had secretly wanted from the first minute she had seen it!
Before she could gather herself together and hurry past he was opening the gate and coming towards her. He stood in front of her, blocking her path.
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ she heard him telling her coolly.
Jodi glared at him, praying that he couldn’t hear the furious, racing thud of her heart or guess just what kind of effect he was having on her.
‘Well, I certainly would not like to talk to you,’ she retaliated.
Liar. Liar! her conscience tormented her silently. And you don’t just want to talk to him either…
Horrified that he might somehow sense what she was feeling, Jodi tried to walk away, but he had already masterfully taken hold of her arm, and as she battled against the dizzying sensation of his touch somehow or other she found that she was being gently but firmly propelled through the gate and into the garden beyond.
She had been in the garden before—at the invitation of the old lady who had lived there who, like Leo, had happened to see her on the path one day.
She had ached then with sadness to see its neglect, and longed to be the one to restore both it and the house to their former glory. Of course that was an impossible dream. Jodi dreaded to imagine just how much money it would take to restore such a large house and so overgrown a garden. Far too much for her, but not, it seemed, too much for Leo Jefferson.
‘Will you please stop manhandling me?’ she demanded angrily as Leo closed the gate, and then her face burned a deep, betraying pink as she saw the way he was looking at her.
If he dared to say one word about anything she might have said to him under the influence of alcohol and desire she would…But to her relief he simply looked at her for several heart-stopping seconds before asking her quietly, ‘What were you doing in my suite?’
Jodi gaped at him. It took her several precious moments to recover from the directness of his question, but finally she did so, rallying admirably to remind him firmly, ‘Well, according to you, I was there because…’ She stopped as he started to shake his head.
‘I don’t want you to tell me what I believed you were doing there, Jodi, I want to hear your version of events.’
Her version. Now he had surprised her. Stubbornly she looked away from him.
‘It doesn’t matter now, does it?’ she challenged him.
‘Doesn’t it? According to your cousin, you were there to ask me to reconsider closing down the factory.’
Flustered, Jodi looked at him before demanding worriedly, ‘You’ve been speaking to Nigel?’
Leo could tell that he had caught her off guard.
‘I told him right from the start that it was a crazy idea, but he wouldn’t listen.’ Barely pausing for breath, she continued, ‘I thought at first he meant that I should talk to you in the hotel foyer, but then he told me that he’d managed to borrow a key card.’
‘And so you went up to the suite to wait for me and whilst you were there you ordered yourself a drink,’ Leo supplied helpfully.
Jodi stared at him.
‘No,’ she denied vehemently, so vehemently that Leo knew immediately she was speaking the truth. Shaking her head, she told him angrily, ‘I would never have ordered a drink without paying for it. No, I asked Nigel to arrange it for me. Nigel thought he’d ordered a soft drink, not—’ She stopped abruptly, clamping her lips together and glowering at Leo.
‘I can’t see what possible relevance any of this has now,’ she began, but Leo was determined to establish exactly what had happened—and why!
‘So whilst you were waiting for me you drank the fruit punch, which was alcoholic, and then…’
Jodi had had enough.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she told him fiercely, ‘and you can’t make me.’
‘You went to bed with me,’ Leo reminded her softly. ‘And from what I’ve learned about you, Jodi Marsh, that is something—’
‘It was nothing,’ Jodi denied sharply. ‘And, anyway, you were the one who went to bed with me. I was already there, asleep.’
‘In my bed…and you—’ Leo stopped abruptly. This wasn’t getting them anywhere and it wasn’t what he wanted to say.
‘Look,’ he told her quietly, ‘it seems that I misjudged the situation…made an error about the reasons for you being there,’ he corrected himself. ‘And, that being the case, I really think that we should discuss—’
‘There isn’t anything I want or need to discuss with you,’ Jodi jumped in tensely.
The fact that he might have mistaken her reason for being in his suite, and even the fact that he was prepared to acknowledge as much, made no difference to what she had done or how she felt about it.
‘What happened just isn’t important enough to warrant discussing,’ she added, determined to bring their conversation to an end, but to her consternation Leo was refusing to let the subject drop.
‘Maybe not to you, but I happen to feel rather differently,’ he said curtly. ‘It is not, let me tell you, my habit to indulge in casual sex with a succession of unknown partners.’
Casual sex! Jodi had to struggle to prevent herself from physically cringing. Was there to be no end to the humiliation her behaviour was forcing her to suffer?
Before she could stop herself she was retorting passionately, ‘For your information, I have not had a succession of partners, and in fact…’
Abruptly she fell silent, her face flushing. No, she must not tell him that! If she did he was bound to start asking even more questions than he already had, and there was absolutely no way she was going to tell him about that idiotic foolishness she had experienced when she had first seen him in the hotel foyer.
No doubt some might claim that she had fallen in love with him at first sight, and that was why…but she, Jodi, was made of sterner and far more realistic stuff. She was a modern-thinking woman and would not contemplate such nonsense!
What was it about her that infuriated him to the point where he itched to take hold of her and make her listen to him? Leo wondered distractedly, unable to stop himself from focusing on her mouth and remembering how hot and sweet it had tasted. He wanted to kiss her again now, right here. But she was already turning back towards the gate, and a sudden surge of common sense warned him against the folly of going after her and begging her to stay when it so plainly wasn’t what she wanted. But she had wanted him that night. She had wanted him and he had wanted her right back. And for him the proble
m was that he still did.
‘Jodi?’ he began, making a last attempt to talk to her, but, as he had already known she would, she shook her head.
‘No, I…’
She barely had time to give a disbelieving and indignant gasp before she was dragged unceremoniously and ruthlessly into Leo’s arms, and held there tightly.
Against his ardent seeking mouth she tried to make a protest, but it was smothered immediately by the hot passion of his kiss…dizzying her, bemusing her, confusing her, so that somehow instead of repudiating him she was actually moving closer, reaching out to him…
Somewhere deep in her brain a warning bell started to ring, but Jodi ignored it, Leo was kissing her and there was no way she wanted anything, least of all some silly old warning bell, to come between her and the sheer intensity and excitement, the total bliss, of feeling his mouth moving possessively and passionately against her own.
‘Mmm…’
Leo could feel the heavy, crazy thud of his heartbeat as Jodi suddenly dropped her defensive attitude and became so soft, so pliable, so bewitchingly and adorably warm in his arms that he was sorely tempted to pick her up and carry her straight to his bed.
But a bird calling overhead suddenly brought Jodi to her senses; white-faced and shaking, she pulled away from him. How on earth could she have allowed that to happen? Her mouth stung slightly and she had to resist the temptation to run her tongue-tip over it—to comfort it because it was missing the touch of Leo’s? She ached from head to foot and she had started to tremble. Shocked to her heart by her lack of self-control, she cried out to him in a low tortured voice, ‘Don’t you ever touch me again…ever!’
And then she was gone, turning on her heel to flee in wretchedness, her heart throbbing with pain and self-contempt, refusing to stop as she heard Leo calling after her.
Jodi was still trembling when she reached the security of her own home. She had heard a rumour in the village that Ashton House had a tenant, but it had never occurred to her that it might be Leo Jefferson. Nigel had warned her that Leo had said that the negotiations over which of the factories he intended to close were likely to be protracted, but why did he have to move here to Frampton?
She felt as though there wasn’t a single aspect of her life he hadn’t now somehow penetrated and invaded.
Or a single aspect of herself?
Hurriedly she walked into her small kitchen and started to prepare her supper. Nigel had rung earlier and suggested they have dinner together, but Jodi had told him she was too busy, worried that if she saw him she might inadvertently betray the plans for the demonstration the following day.
Not that they were doing anything illegal, but she knew that Nigel would not entirely approve of her involvement in what was going to happen and would try his best to dissuade her.
She loved her cousin very much, they were in many ways as close as if they had been brother and sister, and she knew how shocked he would be if he was to learn how she had behaved with Leo Jefferson. She felt ashamed herself…but what was making her feel even worse were the dreadful dreams she kept having in which she relived what had happened—and enjoyed it.
Swallowing hard, Jodi tried to concentrate on what she was doing, but somehow she had lost her appetite. For food, that was. Standing in the garden earlier with Leo, there had been a moment when she had looked up at him, at his mouth, and she had never felt so hungry in her life…
Leo woke up with a start, wondering where he was at first, in the unfamiliarity of his new bedroom at Ashton House. He had been dreaming about Jodi and not for the first time. Reaching for the bedside lamp, he switched it on. The house had been repainted prior to being let and the smell of fresh paint still hung faintly on the air. Leo got out of bed and padded over to the window, pushing back the curtains to stare into the moonlit garden.
In his sleep he had remembered something about Jodi that disturbed him. Something he had not previously properly registered, but something that, knowing what he did now, made perfect sense!
Was it merely his imagination or had there really been a certain something about Jodi’s body that might mean he had in fact been her first lover?
No, it was absurd that he should think any such thing. Totally absurd. She had been so uninhibited, so passionate…
But what if he was right? What if, in addition to having unwittingly drunk the alcoholic concoction supplied by her cousin and fallen asleep, she had been totally inexperienced?
Leo swallowed hard, aware of how very difficult he was finding it to use the word ‘virgin’, even in the privacy of his own thoughts.
But surely if that had been the case she would have said something.
Such as what? he derided himself. Oh, by the way, before I went to bed with you I was a virgin.
No, that would not be her style at all. She was far too independent, had far too much pride.
But if she had been a virgin…
At no point in the proceedings had she suggested that they should be thinking in terms of having safe sex, and he had certainly not been prepared either emotionally or practically to take on that responsibility, which meant…
There was no way Leo could sleep now. So far as Jodi’s sexual health was concerned, and his own, if he was right and she had been a virgin, he knew he need have no worries, but when it came to the risk of an unplanned pregnancy—that was a very different matter. And one surely that must be concerning Jodi herself.
He would very definitely have to talk to her now, and insist that she give him the answers to his questions.
Closing his eyes, he forced himself to recall every single second of the hours they had spent together—not that there was really any force involved, after all, his body and his senses had done precious little else other than relive the event ever since it had happened. But this time it was different, this time he was looking for clues, signs that he might have previously missed.
There had been that sweetly wonderful closeness between them in their most intimate moments, the feeling of her body being tightly wrapped around him. But she had said nothing. Given no indication that…What in hell’s name had she been doing? he wondered, suddenly as angry for her as though she were his personal responsibility.
She was a schoolteacher, for heaven’s sake. She was supposed to behave responsibly!
If she had been a virgin it put a completely different complexion on the whole situation. He was perhaps more Italian than he had ever previously realised, Leo recognised wryly as he felt an atavistic sense of male protectiveness engulf him, and with it an even more unexpected sense of pride. Because he had been her first lover? Because she might have accidentally conceived his child? Just how chauvinistic was he?
His mother, of course, would be overjoyed. A grandchild, and the kind of daughter-in-law she would wholly approve of and love showing off to her Italian relatives.
Whoa…Leo cautioned himself. These were very dangerous and foolish thoughts that had no business whatsoever clogging up his head.
For one insane moment he actually wondered if his mother might have gone ahead and got her village wise woman to put some kind of a love spell on him. Then reality resurfaced.
There was only one person to blame for the situation he was in and that one person was himself. He could, after all, have resisted Jodi. She was a woman, small and slender, weighing, he guessed, something around a hundred and twenty pounds, whilst he was a man, taller, heavier, and perfectly capable of having stopped her had he so wanted to.
Only he hadn’t…
Have a heart, he protested to himself; she was there, warm, wanton, beddable, and totally and completely irresistible. It made him ache right through to the soles of his feet right now just to think about it.
Leo grimaced as he felt his body’s unmistakable reaction to his thoughts.
He wanted her in a way that was totally alien to anything he had ever experienced before.
He wanted her. He wanted her. Oh, heavens, how he wanted her!
She had felt so much safer when Leo Jefferson had not known who she was, when he had for some incomprehensible reason believed she was in cahoots with Jeremy Driscoll. Jeremy Driscoll! Jodi gave a brief shudder. Loathsome man!
One of the women who was going to be demonstrating had said at their committee meeting that she had seen Jeremy at the factory, coming out of a disused storeroom. He hadn’t seen her and she had said that he had been behaving very furtively.
None of the workers liked Jeremy, and Jodi had wondered just exactly what he had been doing at the factory when it now belonged to Leo. Not that it was any concern of hers. No, her concern was much closer to home.
She had come so close to betraying herself this evening when Leo had been questioning her. The last thing she wanted was for him to realise that, far from being the experienced sensualist he obviously thought she was, she had, in fact, been a virgin before she had taken it into her idiotic head to go to bed with him.
And the reason she didn’t want him to know the truth was because she was terrified that if he did he might start questioning just why she had been so compulsively attracted to him, so totally unable to resist the temptation he had represented.
She could, of course, always claim that, as a woman in her twenties, she had begun to see her virginity as a burden she wanted to free herself from, but somehow she doubted that he would believe her. He was too shrewd, too perceptive for that.
If he should ever find out just how she had felt about him when she had seen him in the hotel foyer Jodi knew that she would just die of embarrassment and humiliation.
But of course it was totally impossible that he should find out, wasn’t it? Because only she knew.
And only she was going to know.