‘What about my brother?’ Leo’s mouth tightened but he kept his voice neutral.
‘Do you know how to get in touch with him?’
‘I fail to see where you’re going with this.’
Heather glanced at him, surprised at the unwelcoming response. ‘Don’t you think that he should know about Katherine’s fall?’ This innocent question was greeted with stunning silence as Leo began driving slowly through the cluttered car-park, looking for a free space and complaining about the incompetence of the council, which had closed off a section of the car-park for repair work which appeared to be at a complete standstill.
‘Aren’t you going to give me a lecture about the virtues of public transport at this point?’ he asked, neatly backing his car into a space which left them just about enough room to wriggle out. ‘Or at least the perils of being seduced into buying cars that are too big to be useful? Maybe a sermon about the curse of the workaholic and the amount of time they waste trying to make money to buy things that aren’t essential?’
After what had been a fraught-free drive to the hospital, Heather was confused at the sudden cool mockery in Leo’s voice. Where had that come from?
‘I don’t care what you choose to spend your money on. It can’t buy happiness.’
‘There are times when you are a walking, breathing cliché, do you know that?’
‘Why can’t you be nice for longer than five seconds?’ Heather snapped, glaring at him over the hood of his sleek car before slamming the door shut. ‘One minute you’re apologising for embarrassing me, and the next minute you’re trying to start an argument for no good reason! I was just asking…’
‘There’s no need to drag my brother into this,’ Leo told her abruptly, raking his fingers through his hair. ‘Not that anyone is that certain of his whereabouts.’
‘Your mother must know where he is,’ Heather persisted. ‘And wouldn’t it be only fair to fill him in? Of course, if he’s halfway across the world there’s no need for him to head back to England, but he deserves to know.’
‘This is not a matter open to discussion.’
‘Your mother might disagree with that.’
Leo, striding towards the hospital entrance, swung round to face her.
She was staring up at him, hands planted firmly on her hips, her mouth pursed in angry defiance.
This was what turned him on and drove him nuts in equal measure. Driven by a sense of frustration, Leo reached out and pulled her angrily towards him, catching her by surprise so that she tumbled into him, her body soft and unresistant because she had had no time to shove him away.
There was nothing tender about the savage assault of his mouth against hers. He curled his long fingers into her hair and, although she was too stunned to put up much of a fight, he still drew her fiercely against him.
In that moment of complete shock, Heather felt her whole body go up in flames. It was as if a match had been struck inside her and had found that her defences, instead of being iron clad, were made of tinder.
Her lips parted wordlessly to accept his questing, urgent tongue. She heard herself give a soft moan. They were standing to one side, but she was still vaguely aware of people walking past them. Frankly, she couldn’t have cared less what sort of spectacle they were making.
Her breasts were tender, crushed against his chest, and the abrasive rub of her bra against her nipples was sending tingling sensations all through her body, down to where a honeyed dampness had her aching for more.
When he tore himself away, it was like being hit suddenly by a cold breeze. She had a few seconds of realising that she actually missed having his arms around her. The silence between them seemed to stretch into eternity, and he wasn’t looking at her. It didn’t take the IQ of a genius to realise that he had come to his senses—which was more than she had done—and was already regretting his lapse in judgement.
‘How dare you?’ Heather struggled to hang on to her dignity, but her belated outrage withered away under his look of incredulity.
‘Spare me the protest,’ Leo told her. A group of people weaved around them and he pulled her further to one side. No, this was definitely not how things were supposed to happen. ‘I didn’t notice you turning away in revulsion. In fact, just the opposite—but then we both know what’s going on here, don’t we?’
‘Yes! We’re on our way to pay a visit to your mother and we—we made a bit of a mistake along the way…’ She had the grace to blush. ‘You kissed me, and…’
‘You’re going to have to stop doing that, you know.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Pretending that you’re the innocent victim. It just doesn’t sit well with the truth. Fact is, if we hadn’t been here then there’s no telling where we would have ended up.’
‘Nowhere! I’ve already told you how I feel about you, how I feel about relationships.’
‘I know. At great length. But it seems to me that your body’s telling a different story.’
‘I never said that I didn’t find you an attractive specimen.’ She liked the use of that word. It distanced her from the living, breathing, sexy, red-blooded male staring at her.
Leo cocked his head to one side and continued to look at her. In an ideal world—the one in which he played the starring role as the man destined to get precisely what he wanted and exactly in the manner in which he wanted it—there would have been dimmed lighting, an atmosphere of crackling, electric tension, the kind of tension that precedes inevitable surrender. She would have come to him, unable to resist her urges, melted into him and maybe, just maybe, he would have asked her to tell him just how much she wanted him.
Unfortunately the situation was hardly ideal. They were standing outside the hospital. There were people all around them, and the overhead sun was just about as far away from dimmed lighting as it was possible to get.
She also, crucially, had not come to him. She might not have been able to resist those urges of hers, but the stark truth of it was that she was backing away now at a rate of knots. Leo was left wondering how the hell he had lost control of the situation yet again.
He had wanted to shut her up. The subject of his brother was off limits, and the desire to put it to rest had resulted in…
‘Oh, I know that much,’ he said softly. ‘The little pretence you’re hiding behind is that you can turn your attraction on and off like a tap.’
‘We should go inside. Put that little lapse behind us.’
‘Again.’
Heather flushed uncomfortably. Again. The softly spoken word dropped like a toxic rock into a still lake. She could feel the consequences rippling out.
‘Okay. Again.’ It took a lot of will power to meet his eyes when actually she wanted to duck inside the building and pretend that kiss had never taken place. Again.
‘So what are you trying to say?’
‘Nothing.’ Leo shrugged and squinted against the sun. Twice he had felt the vibration of his mobile inside his pocket, twice he had chosen to ignore it. Playing truant definitely had its upside.
Although he was not looking at her—in fact, making sure not to look at her—he knew the female species intimately enough to know that this was a woman in the process of questioning herself, a woman on the edge of surrender, and the thought of that gave him an unbelievable high.
‘Shall we go in? It’s pretty hot out here.’
That was it, the sum total of his response?
Katherine was very upbeat, but for the entire time they were there Heather was unable to relax. Her eyes kept drifting to Leo—the way he sat, the way he crossed his legs, walked towards the window—everything.
By the time they finally left, she felt shattered. She had meant to talk to Katherine about Alex, about whether she wanted him to know about the fall—because whether her son was told about the accident was her decision, and not Leo’s—but in any event it never crossed her mind, which was far too busy thinking about other things.
It seemed ironic that when Leo had made that pass at her, had invited her into his bed, she had stoutly refused to have anything to do with the idea, had climbed onto her podium and made her feelings known loud and clear, had dispatched him with the ringing assertion that she was far too sensible to indulge in something for the wrong reasons.
She had just about managed to hold on to the notion that that one kiss had been an aberration.
This time, she knew what she had felt, and she knew that she had wanted much more. There was no way that she could hide behind the guise of the blushing fair maiden taken advantage of by the devil in disguise.
And now, Leo was far from interested in talking about anything. He might have kissed her, but it hadn’t been a kiss of encouragement. He had been angry and frustrated with her, and his kiss had reflected that, it had been hard and punishing, and she had still clung to him like a limpet. She believed that she had actually moaned at one point.
‘So…’ she began hesitantly, once inside his car. ‘Do you want to talk about what happened back then?’
Leo’s brow knitted into a frown. ‘What happened back then…?’
‘You know.’ He obviously had no idea what she was on about. ‘You kissed me.’