The Party Starts at Midnight

by Lucy King

  So she yanked her shoulders back, set her jaw, scanned his upper body for a suitable target and absolutely did not think about how it might feel to run her fingers over his chest, his abdomen, maybe following the trail of her hands with her mouth, down, towards the sheet and then lower...

  She blinked and snapped her gaze up. His arm would do. Right. She flexed her hands, leaned forwards and gave his bicep a quick prod.

  ‘Mr Cartwright,’ she murmured, her voice sounding unusually husky and weirdly seductive. ‘Leo.’

  He grunted and shifted but he didn’t wake, and, remembering the bottle in the study, Abby wondered how much he’d had to drink. Then she cleared her throat, put her hand flat on his shoulder and, ignoring the heat of his skin and the hardness of his muscle beneath her palm, said his name again. But this time it was loudly and not in the least bit seductively, and the shake she gave him could have roused an elephant.

  Which seemed to do the trick because with a bellow that made her nearly topple backwards in fright he twisted round, thrashed about a bit, then jackknifed up.

  And just when she thought that the situation couldn’t get any worse, just when she thought her body had undergone enough physical wrangling for one evening, there went the sheet.

  Abby’s gaze automatically shot down his chest to his partially exposed and—oh, Lord—very aroused crotch and, with a strangled yelp, she clapped her hand to her eyes, and thought with the one brain cell that hadn’t yet shut down in defeat, no unwelcome surprises? No embarrassing moments? And no inappropriate or foolish behaviour? Hah, who had she been kidding?

  * * *

  A second ago Leo had been asleep. That much he knew. Now he wasn’t. That much he knew too. Which was a shame because he’d been having the best dream about a warm woman who smelt of flowers and who’d been leaning over him, murmuring his name and—rather randomly but pleasingly—been just about to kiss him.

  But something had disturbed him. Jolted him and roused him to the extent that he was now sitting bolt upright in bed, his pulse racing, his instincts dazed and confused and adrenalin shooting through his blood.

  He raked his hands through his hair and gave his head a shake but it didn’t dispel the sleep-induced fuzziness, the bewilderment or the thundering of his heart.

  What the hell had happened? he wondered dizzily. What had woken him? Not a nightmare, that was for sure. So had it been a noise? A movement? What?

  Rolling his shoulders, Leo blinked once, twice, rubbed his gritty eyes with the heels of his hands as he struggled to work it out, and then, quite suddenly, he froze. His entire body tensed and his ears pricked because, hang on, what on earth was that?

  It sounded like a breath. To his left. Being released, slowly, carefully, lengthily, as if the owner didn’t want him to hear, and ending in a sigh, a whimper, or maybe a moan.

  Whatever it was, with the adrenalin still pumping through his veins, preparing his body and mind for fight, Leo dropped his hands and snapped his head round. And nearly leapt a foot in the air because there beside his bed, sitting back on her heels with one hand clamped over her eyes and the other clasped to her chest, was a woman. Slim, reddish-blonde and wearing a dark blue dress with a bow thing tied round her waist. Unknown, uninvited and apparently in as much shock as he was.

  Glancing down and seeing the dramatic effect that the dream he’d been having had had on him—which was presumably the reason she’d covered her eyes and explained the harsh, ragged breathing that was making her chest heave—Leo grabbed the sheet and yanked it over his lap.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he snapped, his voice rough with sleep and astonishment.

  ‘Abby Summers,’ she said quickly, hoarsely.

  The name didn’t ring any bells, but then maybe that wasn’t surprising because nothing was ringing any bells right now apart from the fact that he was naked and not alone. ‘What are you doing in my bedroom?’

  ‘Looking for you.’

  ‘On your knees?’

  ‘Long story,’ she said. ‘Not important.’

  Wasn’t it? Who knew? Leo could barely think straight, let alone work out what might or might not be of importance here. He was too busy processing the fact that there was a strange woman in his bedroom, on the floor with her eyes covered and her breath coming in tiny gasps, making him think of blindfolds and what her gasps might turn into if he suggested she join him actually on the bed instead of beside it. All of which was so unbelievably out of character, so wholly inappropriate and so crazily beyond the realms of his usually rock-solid self-control, his brain would have reeled had it been up to it.

  ‘How did you get in?’ he muttered, totally thrown by how badly he wanted to grab her and roll her beneath him when he knew absolutely nothing about her or why she was here, and thinking that, damn, that dream had a lot to answer for.

  ‘The lift.’

  ‘It’s locked.’

  ‘Your brother gave me his key card.’

  His brother? Huh? Now what was going on? Leo rubbed a hand over his face in an effort to wake himself up and get a grip on things. ‘Jake did?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded and the light caught her hair, making it glint gold—no, copper—no, gold—and, momentarily distracted, he wondered what it would be like to pull it down and run his fingers through it. If it would feel as silky and soft as it looked. How many words there were to describe its colour.

  Flexing his fingers, then folding his arms and shoving his hands into his armpits just in case they got ideas, Leo hauled his concentration—such as it was—back on track. ‘Why?’

  ‘So I could come up and find you, of course,’ she said as if it couldn’t be clearer, which it wasn’t.

  But the mention of his brother seemed to have triggered his memory because snippets of the last conversation he and Jake had had were filtering into his head, slowly lifting the fog of confusion and, ah-h-h, now it was all becoming clear.

  The time of year.

  His mood.

  The mention his brother had made of a gift.

  Evidently Jake had followed up on his promise, and therefore Leo knew exactly who Abby Whoever-She-Was was, and what she was here for.

  ‘Right,’ he muttered, not really up to working out how he felt about what his brother had done. ‘I get it. You’re here to cheer me up.’

  There was a pause, during which he watched her mouth open, close, then open again to emit a slightly startled, ‘What?’

  ‘Jake said he was going to send me something to make me feel better,’ he said flatly. ‘And here you are, all dressed up like a gift. In my bedroom. Virtually in my bed. So who are you? Someone who owes him a favour? One of his desperate-to-please exes? Or a professional?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOR WHAT FELT like the longest time Abby didn’t say anything. Didn’t do anything. She couldn’t. She was speechless. Stunned into immobility.

  So much for explaining why she was really here, as she’d been about to. And so much for thinking that she was muddling through what was a hideously awkward situation reasonably all right.

  That assumption had been well and truly shot out of the water because had he really just said what she thought he’d said? Implied what she thought he’d implied? Did he really think that she’d been sent to seduce him? In a professional capacity? Supplied by his brother?

  Her mind was blank with shock and she was reeling all over again because OK, so he didn’t know who she was—the meetings she’d had had always been with Jake, who was the face of the company while Leo very firmly remained in the background, and from what she understood he’d been away a lot of the time anyway—but seriously? Didn’t he recognise her name? Hadn’t he received any of her emails? And was this really the way his supposedly razor-sharp brain worked?

  With her jaw about to hit the floor, Abby q
uite forgot the purpose of the hand-to-eye combo, which wasn’t just to protect his modesty but also to stop her from ogling his body, lowered her hand and stared at him.

  And immediately wished she hadn’t because prone and passed out he’d been impressive, but sitting upright, radiating energy, tension, and well, sheer presence, he practically robbed her of breath, never mind speech.

  Not that he was exactly waiting for an answer even if she had been able to provide one. No. Now, to add insult to injury, he appeared to be checking her out, looking over her, slowly, lazily and thoroughly, his gaze sliding from her eyes to her mouth to her breasts and lower, lingering over every available inch of her.

  And dammit if her body didn’t begin to respond to his scrutiny. To her appal, she could feel it happening. The heat pooling in her stomach. The tingles prickling her skin. The tension winding through her muscles and the beginnings of desire, intoxicating and heady and so inappropriate on so many levels she didn’t know who she was more disgusted with, herself or him.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, finally raising dark, inscrutable eyes to hers and arching an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m none of the above,’ she said tartly, silently adding you obnoxious jerk and feeling her estimation of him—which had previously been pretty high given everything he and his brother had achieved—plummet through every one of the thirty floors that lay between them and solid ground.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Well, whatever you are,’ he said flatly, ‘you’ve had a wasted journey because I’m not interested.’

  And, wham, there was another insult.

  Abby swallowed back a gasp and tried not to recoil at the bolt of—what was that? Disappointment? Couldn’t be. Hurt? No way. Outrage? Definitely. That was what it was. She was outraged. Offended. Incensed.

  And she’d had enough. Certainly of being on the floor and having him looking down on her with such dry disdain, such ice-cold superiority when he was so totally, so unbelievably in the wrong.

  Setting her jaw and trying to formulate a response that wouldn’t cost her her job, she grabbed her clipboard and, holding it to her middle like some sort of a shield, stood up.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, fixing a cool smile to her face and just about keeping a lid on the urge to tell him exactly what she thought of him because however much of a jerk he was he was still a client, and an influential one at that, ‘I am here in a professional capacity, just not the one you’re thinking of.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’m an event organiser,’ she said, then added pointedly, ‘Your event organiser. And you’re paying me a lot for the privilege, so there’s absolutely nothing “gifty” about it at all.’

  There followed a couple of seconds of silence as presumably this sank into his seriously warped brain and then something that she hoped might be mortification flickered across his face.

  ‘My event organiser,’ he echoed with a faint frown, as if it was taking considerable effort to assimilate the information, which maybe it was because his head was clearly a mess. But, ooh, she didn’t like the way he emphasised the ‘my’, whether he’d meant it that way or not.

  ‘Yours and Jake’s,’ she clarified, then added in a tone so chilly it could have frozen the Sahara, ‘And just in case we’re still not clear, the event I’ve organised for this evening is your Christmas-slash-ten-year-anniversary party taking place right now downstairs. The party you’re meant to be at. Thanking your staff for all their hard work this year, celebrating your success, and generally being around looking full of festive cheer.’ Instead of being upstairs, unconscious as the result of a drinking spree and then flinging potentially slanderous allegations about the place.

  His jaw tightened, his dark eyes narrowed and she thought that she’d never seen anyone less full of festive cheer, but that wasn’t her problem.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Seven.’

  He swore and raked his hands through his hair and she kept her eyes firmly on his face, not lowering them to watch the play of muscles and the stretch of his chest caused by the gesture for even a second. ‘I overslept,’ he muttered with a frown.

  If that was the way he wanted to put it, she thought, swallowing hard and locking her knees because she might have peeked just for a moment and she might be feeling a bit faint, then that was up to him. If he thought it all right to drink himself into oblivion and shirk his responsibilities, then fine. ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Long night,’ he said with a faint apologetic smile that didn’t mollify her in the slightest. ‘And an even longer day. On top of some pretty hideous jet lag.’

  ‘None of my business,’ she said, as interested in his excuses as much as she was interested in why he hadn’t had a woman in his bed for years. Which was absolutely not at all. ‘What is my business is that dinner’s in half an hour and people are wondering where you are, which is why Jake sent me to look for you.’

  He nodded and rubbed a hand along his jaw. ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’ she asked a bit archly because there seemed to be an awful lot he hadn’t seen in the last ten minutes, such as the clipboard, which surely marked her out as anything other than a lady of the night and to which she was now clinging as if it were a reminder to keep a grip on the self-control that was badly in danger of unravelling. ‘Really? Well, that’s great. And now I have found you, I’ll be going.’

  She shot him a quick, professional smile and then turned on her heel because she really had to get out of there before she either said or, worse, did something she’d regret, only to jerk to a halt when he said, ‘Wait.’

  ‘What?’ she said, swivelling round and seeing his smile deepen and turn into something so unexpected, so lethally attractive, that she went all hot and dizzy and once again forgot that she was anything other than a woman badly in need of kissing.

  ‘I believe I owe you an apology.’

  She blinked, totally thrown by the switch in his demeanour and the change to his features, but somehow managed to keep that smile fixed to her face. ‘Accepted.’

  ‘I was out of order. Not thinking straight. Half asleep.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Forget it. I have. Now if you’ll excuse me, I ought to be getting back to the party, so I’ll tell Jake you’ll be down in, what, ten minutes?’

  Leo ran a hand through his hair and then grimaced, his smile turning from lethal to wry, although no less devastating for it, and Abby steeled herself against its effect before taking a hasty step back towards the door, towards escape.

  ‘As for some reason I appear to smell like a distillery,’ he said dryly, ‘you’d better make it twenty.’

  * * *

  Twenty minutes might have been long enough to wash away the foul smell of stale whisky and douse the heat and desire that Abby had unexpectedly conjured up in him, but it wasn’t nearly long enough to figure out what the hell had been going on with him back there in his bedroom.

  Tugging his cuffs out from beneath the sleeves of his jacket, Leo set his jaw and strode into the lift, the excruciating details of the last half an hour or so slamming into his head all over again.

  Had he really accused her of basically being a prostitute? Had he really thought Jake would organise something like that? And had he really not only eyed her up but actually, for the briefest, maddest moment while overwhelmed by inexplicable lust, seriously considered taking her up on an offer that wasn’t even on the table?

  What was the matter with him?

  Feeling strangely short of breath in a way that had nothing to do with the faster-than-lightning descent of the lift, Leo ran a finger around the inside of his collar to ease it and wished he could wipe the whole mortifying scene from his brain.

  There were faintly mitigating circumstances, it was true. His brain had been fogged
up with sleep and he’d been disorientated. In something of a state of shock and very confused. And then there was the fact that he was absolutely exhausted as a result of work, travel and the time of the year, which always gave him sleepless nights and set him on edge.

  But was any of that an excuse? No, it wasn’t. If he’d been thinking clearly he’d have waited for her to explain, would have given her at least the nanosecond of a chance before rushing in with his ridiculous assumptions. He’d have clocked the clipboard earlier and probably come to a very different conclusion.

  He’d certainly have kept his mouth shut. Silence was an excellent and effective weapon, he knew that, and if only his brain hadn’t been completely addled he wouldn’t have dug himself into a hole so deep that, despite her apparent acceptance of his apology, he wasn’t sure he’d got out of it.

  But then he hadn’t been thinking clearly. Or rationally. He hadn’t been thinking at all. At least not with his head. For the majority of their encounter he’d been thinking with a different part of his anatomy entirely.

  At the image of Abby standing there, beautiful blue eyes flashing while she set him straight, magnificent in her indignation and her efforts to hide it, a wave of heat surged though him, making his pulse spike and, to his frustration, his body harden.

  Ruthlessly deleting the image, Leo reminded himself of the ice-cold shower he’d just taken, and as the lift doors opened and he stepped out he decided to delete the rest of the episode up there in his bedroom too, because how the hell was he supposed to get through this evening if he kept remembering how much he’d wanted to take her to bed?

  Doing up the button of his dinner jacket, he strode in the direction of the venue for tonight’s celebrations, searching for the clarity of thought and steely self-control he’d always taken for granted and just about finding it.

  There was nothing he could do to undo what had happened, he reasoned, but with any luck his and Abby’s paths wouldn’t cross again. She’d be working and he’d be doing the thanking of his staff and attempting—though probably failing—to dispense the festive cheer she’d mentioned. Once the evening was over he’d never have to think of her or his fifteen minutes of complete mental meltdown ever again.