Right now she was as stiff as a block of wood, and was making damned sure to look anywhere but at him.
‘You’re bristling.’
‘I am not bristling.’
‘My mother’s stuff has been safely stored away in one of the other rooms. You can rest assured that I haven’t started a bonfire with the lot. If you like, I can take you for an inspection, make sure I haven’t broken anything in the moving process.’
‘Ha, ha. Hilarious. Just out of interest, exactly how long are you planning to stay?’ Heather asked, roaming round the room and inspecting all the new additions with a jaundiced eye. She could feel him behind her, all alpha-male temptation, which her disobedient fingers were longing to touch. She folded her arms just in case they developed a mind of their own.
‘As long as it takes. Within reason, of course.’
‘You’ve gone to all this expense for a few days?’
‘Days? That’s either a monumental understatement or a severe case of wishful thinking. I would think along the line of weeks rather than days.’
‘All right, then. Weeks.’
‘Time is money, and it pays for me to be able to work to a hundred-percent capacity while I’m here.’
‘You’ve certainly done away with all the atmosphere,’ Heather remarked, looking at the black ash-and-chrome desk festooned with high-tech equipment, so at odds with the faded, flowered wallpaper and the lonesome bowl of pot pourri on the bookcase which Leo had obviously missed by accident.
‘It pays to have a working environment that’s devoid of distractions.’ No peculiar, baggy jogging-bottoms and oversized sweat shirt today. She was wearing a cotton dress with a pattern of very tiny flowers and a pair of sandals. He wondered, idly, exactly how long it would take him to undo the innumerable little pearl buttons that hooked her in.
He was vaguely aware that she was doing it again, making him lose focus, encouraging his rebellious mind to take a stroll down a pleasurable, imaginary path. Whereas before this had infuriated the hell out of him, Leo was fast losing interest in the urge to question the fact that the woman confused and confounded him like no other woman had ever done before.
Having always been a great believer in the inescapable truth that ‘fate’ was the last fallback of people who were too weak to realise that they controlled events, rather than the other way around, he was quite happy to put a different spin on things now. Fate had seen fit to throw them together, and who was he to deny his primal, manly urge to hunt and capture? He had tried bringing all his formidable intelligence and powers of reasoning to bear on the matter and what good had it done him? He had still ended up thinking of the woman way too much for his own good.
Logically, he deduced that if he could have her then he would be able to get her out of his system. Naturally, he would not be putting himself out to that end. It was all very well to rise above rejection, but he had his limits. No; she would come to him. She would surrender into his arms of her own volition. It would be a truly sweet surrender.
He surfaced to find her looking at him, at the tail end of something that had clearly been sarcastic, judging from the curl of her pink mouth.
‘Sorry. Miles away. What did you say?’
Prissy, Heather thought, self-righteous, zealous in all the wrong ways. And now, to top it all, so boring that he had completely switched off from what she had been saying about liking distractions in the working environment.
‘I was saying that I should get the clothes that I came for and then head for the hospital.’
‘Give me half an hour. I’ll take you.’
‘There’s no need, Leo…’
‘No need for me to visit my mother?’
‘You know that’s not what I mean! You just seem to be very busy here.’
‘Why don’t you let me decide whether I can take time out or not? As you can see, I’m a big boy, more than capable of making decisions without a helping hand.’
Heather blushed furiously at the rebuke, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was walking towards the door, pausing to discuss something with the guy who appeared to be in charge, then he turned to her.
‘Why don’t you go and do whatever it is you came here to do and meet me back in the hall in thirty minutes?’
‘And why don’t you stop giving orders?’
Leo shrugged and began making for the staircase. Heather was behind him. He could hear the soft tread of her steps above the noise of banging coming from the direction of the office. It was amazing how easy it was to rile her, he thought; not that that had been his intention. She was like a cat on a hot tin roof when she was around him, jumping at everything he said, bristling at hidden meanings to throwaway remarks, generally acting as though she would go up in smoke if he came too close to her.
‘It’s in my nature to give orders,’ he said, not turning around. ‘Why do you think that’s a bad thing?’
‘I’m surprised the people who work for you don’t want you strung up! Don’t you know that telling people what to do gets their back up?’
‘Some people need telling what to do.’ He made a right at the top of the staircase and was by his bedroom door when he finally turned to look at her. ‘Besides, how else is a company supposed to be run unless there’s someone in charge telling other people what to do? As a matter of fact, though, if you ask any of the people who work for me they’ll tell you that I’m a pretty fair employer. Big bonuses, generous maternity and paternity leave, fantastic pension scheme…Nothing to complain about.’ He leaned against the doorframe and stared down at her. ‘Anyway,’ he drawled, ‘don’t you think that some people actually like being told what to do?’
‘No.’
‘Because your ex made it his habit to tell you what to do?’
Heather flushed and then laughed derisively. ‘Brian didn’t tell me what to do. He just left me in the dark as to what he was up to. Anyway, that’s not the point.’
Leo pushed himself away from the door frame and turned his back on her. ‘You should loosen up,’ he threw provocatively over his shoulder. ‘You might find that life’s less hard work when you’re not continually arguing the finer points. In other words,’ he added for good measure, ‘you might actually enjoy being subservient…’
Heather was transfixed by the sight of him as he strolled towards his dressing table, leaning to support himself, hands flat on the polished wooden surface as he idly glanced down at the open laptop computer, then standing up, massaging his shoulder with one hand as he walked back towards her. The sound of his murmured, lazy voice was like a drug, making her thoughts sluggish and not giving her time to get herself all worked up by what he was saying.
‘Subservient? I—I can’t think of anything worse…’ she stammered. She was having difficulty remembering what the original topic of conversation had been.
‘No? Funny. Every woman I have ever known has ended up enjoying being controlled. Not in the boardroom, of course.’
He was standing right in front of her, and Heather took a couple of little steps back.
‘Good for them.’
‘You are not like them, however. That much I’ll concede. But I guarantee there’s one order I can give you that you’ll jump to obey.’
‘What?’ she flung at him defiantly, her nerves skittering as he produced a wicked grin and reached for the zip on his jeans.
‘Leave now or else watch me undress. I’m going to have a quick shower.’
Heather was out in two seconds flat. And in half an hour, during which the majority of Leo’s extreme makeover appeared to have been completed, all bar the detail, she was standing at the door, still unnerved by that grinning last word he had had before she had fled the bedroom.
When he finally appeared, his hair was still damp and the jeans and sweaty tee shirt had been replaced with a pair of cream trousers and a cream shirt which made him look infuriatingly healthy and full of beans.
‘I wasn’t sure whether you would wait for me,’ he said once they were on their way to the hospital. ‘And if I embarrassed you back then, please accept my humble apologies.’
Heather looked at him suspiciously out of the corner of her eye. ‘Contrite’ wasn’t an adjective she would have associated with him.
‘You seem very nervous when you’re around me—and I just want you to know,’ Leo continued with a remorselessly pious voice, while he watched with fascination the transparent play of emotions on her face, ‘that you have nothing to be afraid of.’
‘Afraid? I’m not afraid.’
‘No, maybe that’s the wrong word. Tense. There’s no need to feel tense when you’re around me. Let’s not lose sight of the main thing here, which is my mother. I see you’re taking her a few books.’
Heather relaxed. Her imagination had gone into overdrive a bit earlier on, but she was coming back down to earth as she stared straight ahead and chatted to him about Katherine’s progress. The operation had been a success, but she was still immobile and beginning to get bored. She was an avid reader, Heather said, hence the selection of books.
‘She’s particularly fond of travel books,’ Heather told him. ‘I think it makes her think of your brother, which is something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.’ With the busy hospital car-park now in sight, she was pleased with herself that she had managed to sustain a running conversation with Leo about nothing much in particular. There seemed to be a great black hole of missing information when it came to his mother, and he was either a very good actor or else he was genuinely interested in filling in some of the gaps which had hitherto existed.