by Penny Jordan
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—’
But before she could voice her fears Leo was interrupting her.
‘It’s because right now the only bed I want to be in is already occupied, and denied to me,’ he told her huskily. ‘Unless, of course, you’re prepared to change your mind and share it with me?’
Leo knew that he was doing exactly what he had told himself he must not do under any kind of circumstances; that he was behaving like a predator, taking advantage of both Jodi’s vulnerability and her current dependence on him, but he still couldn’t stop himself. Just the sight of her sitting there in his bed, her slim bare arms wrapped around her hunched-up knees as she looked uncertainly up at him, was enough to make him know that he was prepared to be damned for this eternity and every eternity beyond it just to have her in his arms again, to be granted the opportunity to hold her, touch her, kiss her, caress her.
He wasn’t still dressed because he didn’t want her, Jodi realised, or because he was afraid that she might embarrass them both by coming on to him. She could feel her whole body starting to tremble beneath the onrush of wild excitement that was roaring through her.
Leo groaned her name, unable to hold back his longing for her. He reached for her, wrapping her in his arms, his mouth so passionately urgent that the sound of her name was lost beneath his kiss.
Jodi knew that she should resist him, that she should insist that he release her, so why instead of doing so was she clinging shamelessly to him? She opened her mouth eagerly to the demanding probe of his tongue, her whole body racked with a raw, aching hunger for him.
She had almost begun to convince herself that their previous lovemaking couldn’t possibly have been as good as she remembered, that she had exaggerated it, romanticised it, turning it in her mind into an implausible state of perfection that was total fantasy. Now, shockingly, she knew her memory had been at fault, although not in the way that she expected!
Leo’s lovemaking had not been as wonderful as she had remembered—it had been even better! More pleasurable, more intoxicating…
As her body relived the pleasure his had given her Jodi knew that there was no point in trying to stop herself from responding to him, no way she could stop herself from wanting him.
She heard the small, tortured groan that filled her own throat as she feasted greedily on his kiss. The touch of his mouth against hers was like receiving a life-giving transfusion, she told herself dizzily as Leo cupped her face in his hands and held her a willing captive and kissed her with an intimacy that almost stopped her heart.
Jodi trembled and then shuddered as the pleasure of being so close to him filled her, running through her nervous system like pure adrenalin.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’ Jodi could hear the total lack of conviction in the longing-filled softness of her voice.
‘I know,’ Leo responded rawly. ‘But I just can’t stop myself.’
‘I don’t want you to stop!’
Had she really said that? Jodi was shocked by her own wanton lack of restraint, and shocked too by the discovery that somehow or other she had already managed to unfasten half of the buttons of Leo’s shirt.
Beneath her explorative fingertips she could feel the soft silkiness of his body hair.
She leaned forward, breathing in the scent of his skin with deliberate sensuality.
A rush of sensation flooded her, a dizzying kaleidoscope of emotions, recognition—she would recognise his scent anywhere—exaltation, just to have the freedom to be so intimate, so possessively womanly with him. Inhaling his scent only served to remind her of just how many other ached-for intimacies she could enjoy with him. She felt a surge of power, of female strength, knowing that she was responsible for the acceleration of his breathing.
Leo felt himself shudder from top to toe, totally unable to control the fierceness of his response to Jodi. It felt as if every sensation he had ever experienced had just been intensified a thousandfold. Even the simple act of breathing seemed to fill his whole body, his every sense with a heart-rocking awareness of her and longing for her.
This wasn’t, he recognised, mere lust, this was the big one; the one. She, Jodi, was his one and only. But, he knew instinctively, he couldn’t tell her so, not now, not yet; what they were building between them was still too fragile.
He groaned out loud again as Jodi kissed his bared torso. His desire for her ran like fire through his body, the sweetest form of torture.
Swiftly Leo removed the rest of his clothes, never once losing eye contact with Jodi whilst he did so.
He warned himself that she might see in his eyes his love for her, but he couldn’t make himself break the contact between them that seemed to be binding them so intimately close together.
In her eyes he could see wonderment, uncertainty, longing, and even a little old-fashioned female shock. Her body clenched when he cupped the tender ball of her shoulder with one hand whilst tugging off the last of his clothes with the other, but she didn’t make any attempt to break the gaze that was locking them together.
Somehow the silent visual bonding between them was as sensually charged as touching.
His body ached intolerably for her, and so too did his heart, his entire being.
‘Jodi.’ He whispered her name again as he gathered her closer, finally breaking their eye contact to look down at her mouth and then up into her eyes again before slowly brushing his mouth against hers.
Jodi felt as though she was going to explode with the sheer force of the sensual tension building up inside her.
It was a good job she was not some impressionable teenager, she told herself, otherwise she would be in danger of deceiving herself that the way Leo was looking at her, as though he wanted to communicate something deeply meaningful, meant that he really cared about her.
She knew that she ought to bring what was happening between them to an end now, before things went any further, but Leo was taking hold of her, brushing his mouth against hers once more in a way that aroused in her such a sweetly aching desire.
Beneath his mouth Leo could feel Jodi’s parting; he could taste the sweet exhaled breath, feel the soft little tremor that ran through her body as she nestled closer to him.
Leo was stroking her skin with his hands, making her ache and quiver, his mouth leaving hers to caress the vulnerable place where her shoulder joined her throat, nuzzling little kisses up to her ear whilst his tongue-tip investigated its delicate whorls. Each small sensation coalesced, melded together until she was on fire with the heat of the need he was creating inside her.
Her breasts, swelling, peaking, ached for the touch of his hands. As though he seemed to know it he shaped them, stroking the pads of his thumbs over the erect crests of her nipples.
Jodi trembled and moaned, closed her eyes, welcoming the velvet darkness that lapped protectively around her, and then opened them again on a gasp of piercingly sweet pleasure as she felt Leo’s mouth against first one breast and then the other.
Her fingers dug into the hard muscles of his back, her body arching in an irresistible mixture of supplication and temptation.
Leo was kissing her belly, rimming her navel with his tongue. Her fingers clenched in his thick, dark hair. Her intention had been to push him away, but helplessly her hands stilled as he moved lower and then lower still.
Such intimacy was surely only for the most beloved of lovers, but Jodi couldn’t find the strength to resist or deny what he was giving her; her body, like her emotions, clenched first against what was happening, and then gave in.
As he moved his body over hers and entered her Leo immediately felt the first fierc
e contraction of her release. His own body leapt to meet and complete it, his emotions as well as his senses taking hotly satisfying pleasure in knowing they were sharing this moment together.
Jodi cried out Leo’s name, wrapping herself around him, holding him deep inside her, where she had so much wanted him to be. It felt so wondrously right to have him there, a part of her, now and for always.
‘Leo.’
She sighed his name in exhausted pleasure as tears of fulfilment washed her eyes and flowed onto her face, to be tenderly licked away by Leo, before he reached out to wrap her in his arms.
She was asleep before they closed fully around her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LEO allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction when he finally replaced the telephone receiver at the end of what had been a long half-hour of diplomatic discussion with the police.
He had earlier spent a very terse and determined five minutes on the telephone to Jeremy, informing him of the fact that he would most certainly be placing charges against him for unlawfully being on the company’s premises if he was to go ahead and try to accuse Jodi of anything. Did he, Jeremy, Leo had asked grimly, possess the same physical evidence of this supposed assault that Jodi did of his unwarranted manhandling of her? Jeremy had blustered and tried to counter-threaten, but in the end he had given way.
The police had been rather less easy to negotiate with; for a start, as the superintendent had told Leo coolly, they did not take too kindly to the demands the demonstration at the factory had placed on their very limited financial budget, and they were certainly not about to give out a message to the public that acts of violence were something they were prepared to permit.
Leo had protested that the demonstration had been intended to be a peaceful one, citing the fact that he, as the owner of the factory, did not feel it necessary to make any kind of complaint against his workforce, so then surely the matter could be allowed to rest. As it transpired, Leo discovered that in the end none of the protesters had actually been held overnight at the police station, and that Jodi would have been the only one of them who might have faced the prospect of charges, and that only because of the assault incident claimed by Jeremy.