Pride & Consequence Omnibus

by Penny Jordan

  A more thoroughly unpleasant person Leo had yet to meet, and his obvious air of false bonhomie offended Leo almost as much as his totally unwarranted and unwanted offer of bought sex.

  The kind of place, any kind of place, where human beings had to sell themselves for other people’s pleasure had no appeal for Leo, and he made little attempt to conceal his contempt for the other man’s suggestion.

  Jeremy Driscoll, though, it seemed, had a skin of impenetrable thickness. Refusing to take a hint, he continued jovially, ‘No? You prefer to have your fun in private on a one-to-one basis, perhaps? Well, I’m sure that something can be arranged—’

  Leo’s cold, ‘Forget it,’ brought an ugly look of dislike to Jeremy’s too pale blue eyes.

  ‘There’s a lot of antagonism around here about the fact that you’re planning to close down one or other of the factories. A man with your reputation...’

  ‘Oh, I think my reputation can stand the heat,’ Leo replied grittily.

  He could see that his confidence had increased Jeremy’s dislike of him, just as he had seen the envy in the other man’s eyes when he had driven up in his top-of-the-range Mercedes.

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the newspaper that Jeremy had rudely continued to read after Leo’s arrival. There was an article on the page that was open detailing the downfall of a politician who had tried unsuccessfully to sue those who had exposed certain tawdry aspects of his private life, including his visits to a massage parlour. The fact that the politician had claimed that he had been set up had not convinced the jury who had found against him.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about your reputation if I were you,’ Jeremy warned Leo nastily, glancing towards the paper as he spoke.

  Giving him a dismissive look, Leo left.

  * * *

  Leo frowned as he walked into his suite. There was no way in a thousand years he was going to change his plans. He had worked too hard and for too long, building up his business from nothing...less than nothing, slowly, painstakingly clawing his way up from his own one-man band, first overtaking and then taking over his competition as he grew more and more successful.

  The Driscoll family company was in direct competition to Leo’s. Since their business duplicated his own, it was only natural that he should have to close down some of their four factories. As yet Leo had not decided which out of the four. But as for Jeremy Driscoll’s attempt to get him to back out of the deal...!

  Tired, Leo strode into the suite without bothering to switch on the lights. At this time on a June evening there was still enough light in the sky for him not to need to do so, even without the additional glow of the almost full moon.

  The bedroom wasn’t quite as well-lit; someone—the maid, he imagined—had closed the curtains, but the bathroom light was on and the door open. Frowning over such sloppiness, he headed towards the bathroom, closing the door behind him once he was inside.

  Giving his own reflection a brief glance in the mirror, he paused to rub a lean hand over his stubble-darkened jaw before reaching for his razor.

  Jeremy Driscoll’s bombastic arrogance had irritated him to an extent that warned him that those amongst his family and friends who cautioned that he was driving himself too hard might have something of a point.

  Narrowing the silver-grey eyes that were an inheritance from his father’s side, and for whose piercingly analytical and defence-stripping qualities they were rightly feared by anyone who sought to deceive him, he grimaced slightly. He badly needed a haircut; his dark hair curled over the collar of his shirt. Taking time out for anything in his life that wasn’t work right now simply wasn’t an option.

  His parents professed not to understand just where he got his single-minded determination to succeed from. They had been happy with their small newsagent’s business.

  His parents were retired now, and living in his mother’s family’s native Italy. He had bought them a villa outside Florence as a ruby-wedding present.

  Leo had visited them, very briefly, early in May for his mother’s birthday.

  He put down his razor, remembering the look he had seen them exchange when his mother had asked wistfully if there was yet ‘anyone special’ in his life.

  He had told her with dry humour that not only did his negative response to her maternal question relate to his present, but that it could also be applied indefinitely to his future.

  With unusual asperity she had returned that if that was the case then it was perhaps time she paid a visit to the village’s local wise woman and herbalist, who, according to rumour, had an absolutely foolproof recipe for a love potion!

  Leo had laughed outright at that. After all, it was not that he couldn’t have a partner, a lover, if he so wished. Any number of stunningly attractive young women had made it plain to him both discreetly and rather more obviously that they would like to share his life and his bed, and, of course, his bank account... But Leo could still remember how at the upmarket public school he had won a scholarship to the female pupils had been scornfully dismissive of the boy whose school uniform was so obviously bought secondhand and whose only source of money came from helping out in his parents’ small business.

  That experience had taught Leo a lesson he was determined never to forget. Yes, there had been women in his life, but no doubt rather idiotically by some people’s standards, he had discovered that he possessed an unexpected aversion to the idea of casual sex. Which meant...

  Unwantedly Leo remembered his body’s sharply explicit reaction to the woman he had seen in the hotel foyer as he had crossed it on his way to his meeting earlier.

  Small and curvy, or so he had suspected, beneath the abominable clothes she had been wearing.

  Leo’s mother did not have Italian blood for nothing, and, like all her countrywomen, she possessed a strong sense of personal style, which made it impossible for Leo not to recognise when a woman was dressing to maximum effect. This woman had most certainly not been doing that at all. She had not even really been his type. If he was prepared to admit to a preference it was for cool, elegant blondes. Most definitely not for delectably sexy, tousled and touchable types of women, who turned his loins to hotly savage lust and even distracted his mind to the extent that he had almost found himself deviating from his set course and thinking about walking towards her.

  Leo never deviated from any course he set himself—ever—especially not on account of a woman.

  With an indrawn breath of self-disgust, Leo stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower.

  As a teenager he had played sports for his school, which, ironically, had done wonders to increase his ‘pulling power’ with his female schoolmates, and he still had the powerful muscle structure of a natural athlete. Impatiently he lathered his body and then rinsed off the foam before reaching for a towel.

  Once dry, he opened the bathroom door and headed for the bed. It was darker now, but still light enough, thanks to the moonlight glinting through the curtains, for him not to need to switch on the light.

  Flipping back the bedclothes, Leo got into the bed, reaching automatically for the duvet, and then froze as he realised that the bed—his bed—was already occupied.

  Switching on the bedside lamp, he stared in angry disbelief at the tousled head of curly hair on the pillow next to his own—a decidedly female head, he recognised, just like the slender naked arm and softly rounded shoulder he could now see in the lamplight.

  T
he nostrils of the proudly aquiline nose he had inherited from his mother’s Italian forebears flared fastidiously as they picked up the smell of alcohol on the softly exhaled breath of the oblivious sleeping form.

  Another scent—a mixture of warm fresh air, lavender and a certain shockingly earthy sensuality that was Jodi’s alone—his senses reacted to in a very different way.

  It was the girl from the foyer. Leo would have recognised her anywhere, or, rather, his body would.

  Automatically his brain passed him another piece of information. Jeremy Driscoll’s oily-voiced suggestiveness as he had tried to persuade Leo to go back on their contract. Was this...this girl the inducement he’d had in mind? She had to be. Leo could not think of any other reason for her presence here in his bed!

  Well, if Jeremy Driscoll dared to think that he, Leo, was the kind of man who...

  Angrily he reached out to grasp Jodi’s bare arm in strong fingers as he leaned across her to shake her into wakefulness.

  Jodi was fathoms-deep asleep, sleeping the sleep of the pure of heart—and the alcohol-assisted—and she was having the most delicious dream in which she was, by some means her sleeping state wasn’t inclined to question, wrapped in the embrace of the most gorgeous, sexy man. He was tall, dark-haired and silver-eyed, with features reassuringly familiar to Jodi, but his body, his touch, were wonderfully and excitingly new.

  They were lying together, body to body, on a huge bed in a room with a panoramic view of a private tropical beach, and as he leaned towards her and stroked strong fingers along her forearm he whispered to her, ‘What the hell are you doing in my bed?’

  Her brain still under the influence of her ‘fruit cocktail’ Jodi opened bemused, adoring eyes.

  Why was her wonderful lover looking so angry? Smiling sleepily up at him, she was about to ask him, but somehow her attention became focused on how downright desirable he actually was.

  That wonderful naked golden-brown body. Naked. Yummy! More than yummy! Jodi closed her eyes on a sigh of female appreciation and then quickly opened them again, anxious not to miss anything. She watched the way the muscles in his neck corded as he leaned over her, and the sinewy strength of his solid forearms, so very male that she just had to reach out and run an explorative fingertip down the one nearest to her, marvelling at the difference between it and her own so much softer female flesh.

  Leo couldn’t believe his eyes—or his body. She, the uninvited interloper in his bed, was brazenly ignoring his angry question and was actually daring to touch him. No, not just touch, he acknowledged as his body reacted to her with a teeth-clenching jerk that gave an immediate lie to his previous mental use of the word ‘unwanted’. What she was doing—dammit—was outright stroking him, caressing him!

  Torn between a cerebral desire to reject what was happening and a visceral surge of agonisingly intense desire to embrace it, and with it the woman who was tormenting him with such devastating effectiveness, Leo made a valiant struggle to cling to the tenets of discipline and self-control that were the twin bastions of his life. To his shock, he lost. And not just the campaign but the whole war!

  Jodi, though, fuelled now by something far more subtle than alcohol, and far stronger, was totally oblivious to everything but the delicious dream she had found her way into.

  Imagine. When she touched him, like so, the most extraordinary tremors ran right through his whole body—and not just his, she acknowledged as she considered the awesome fact that her own body was so highly responsive, so reactive to every movement of his.

  She was so lucky to be here with him on this wonderful private island of love and pleasure. Tenderly she leaned forward and flicked her tongue-tip delicately against the hollow at the base of his throat, revelling in the sensation of his damp skin against her tongue, its texture, its taste, the way that fierce male pulse thudded to life at her touch.

  Leo couldn’t believe what was happening. What she was doing; what he was letting her do. He found himself lying back against the pillow as she was the one to arch provocatively over him, whilst her tongue busily and far too erotically laved his skin.

  Even in the less than half-light of the shadowy bedroom he could see the naked outline of her body with its narrow waist and softly flaring hips; her legs were delectably shaped, her ankles tiny and delicate, the shadowy triangle of hair between her thighs so soft and tempting that...

  His throat dry with angry tension and gut-wrenching longing, Leo felt his whole body shudder.

  He could see her breasts, soft, rounded, creamy-skinned, with darkly tender crests and tormentingly erect nipples.

  Unable to stop himself, he lifted his hands carefully, cupping them. He could feel their warm weight, and he could feel, too, the tight hardness of those wanton peaks, tauntingly challenging him to...

  Jodi gasped and then shivered in delight as she felt the rough pressure of her lover’s tongue against her nipple.

  ‘Oh, it feels so good,’ she whispered to him, closing her eyes as she gave herself up to the sensations he was arousing. Her hand slipped distractedly from his arm to her own body, flattening betrayingly against her belly as she drew in a juddering breath of delirious pleasure.

  Leo could scarcely believe the sheer wantonness of her reaction to his touch. He tried to remind himself that she was there for a purpose, doing the job she had been hired for, but his senses were too drugged to allow him to think rationally.

  He had known then, in that fleeting second he had seen her in the hotel foyer, that she could affect him like this; that he would want her like this, no matter what the stern voice of his conscience was trying to tell him.

  His hand slid to the curve of her waist and flared possessively over her hip, which fitted as perfectly into his grip as though they had been made for each other.

  Her hands were on his body, their touch somehow innocently explorative, as though he was the first man she had ever been so intimate with—which was a ludicrous thought!

  The soft whispers of female praise she was giving him had to be deliberately calculated to have the maximum effect on a man’s ego—any man’s ego—he tried to remind himself. But somehow he couldn’t stop touching her—couldn’t stop wanting her!

  Jodi sighed blissfully in a sensual heaven. He seemed to know instinctively just how and where to caress her, how to arouse and please her. Her body soared and melted with each wonderful wave of erotic pleasure. Voluptuously she snuggled closer to him shivering in heady excitement as she let her hands wander at will over his body—so excitingly different from her own.

  The bedclothes, which she had pushed away an aeon ago so that she could look at the powerful nakedness of the male body she was now so hungry for, lay in a tangled heap at the bottom of the bed. Moonlight silvered her own body, whilst it turned the larger and more muscular shape of her lover’s into a dark-hued steel.

  She ached so much for him. Her hands moved downwards over him, her gaze drawn to his taut, powerful magnificence.

  Deliberately she drew her fingertips along the hard length of his erection, closing her eyes and shuddering as a deep thrill twisted through her.

  Leo couldn’t understand how he was letting this happen! It went totally against everything he believed in! Never before in his life had he experienced such intense and overwhelmingly mindless desire, nor been so driven by the fierce pulse of it to take what he was being so openly offered.

  Every single one of his senses was responding to her with an uncheckable u
rgency that left his brain floundering.

  The scent, the sight, the feel of her, her touch against his body, even the soft, increasingly incoherent sound of her husky, pleading moans, seemed to strike at a vulnerability inside him that he had never dreamed existed.

  He reached out for her, giving in to the need burning through him to kiss every delicious woman-scented inch of her, and then to do so all over again, slowly and thoroughly, until the unsteadiness of her breathing was a torment to his senses. He finally allowed himself the pleasure of sliding his fingers through the soft, warm tangle of curls concealing her sex, stroking the flesh that lay beneath and slowly parting the outer covering of her to caress her with full intimacy.

  She felt soft, hot, moist and so unbelievably delicate that, ignoring the agonised urging of her voice against his ear, he forced himself to love her slowly and carefully.

  He could feel her body rising up to reach his touch as she writhed frantically against him, telling him in broken words of open pleasure that jolted like electricity through his senses just what she wanted from him and how. She somehow managed to manoeuvre both of them so that he was pushing urgently against her and then inside her, as though the intimacy was beyond his own physical control.

  She felt. She felt...

  Jodi heard the low, visceral male sound he made as he entered her, filled her, and sharp spirals of intense pleasure flooded her body.

  Just hearing that sound, knowing his need, was almost as erotically exciting as feeling him move inside her. Long, slow, powerful thrusts lifted and carried her and caused her to reach out for him, drawing him deep inside her. The pleasure of feeling her body expand to accommodate him was so indescribably precious that she cried out aloud her joy in it and in him. She loved this feeling of being wrapped around him, embracing him, holding him, somehow nurturing and protecting his essential male essence.