As if he could read her thoughts, Leon twisted his dark head to look at her, his voice calm now but grim when he spoke. ‘We will not speak of this again,’ he decreed. ‘The deed is done, our futures set.’ He paused, levelling one final implacable look at her, then leaned across her to open her door. ‘I shall be back here by noon tomorrow. Be ready.’
* * *
The next day, she was packed and waiting when his knock sounded at the flat door. He stepped inside, his gaze running briefly over the loose pale blue cotton sundress she was wearing without revealing his thoughts.
She wondered what he was seeing when he looked at her like that—the desirable woman he had once taken in his arms so passionately? Or did he see the pale shadow of that woman she felt she had become?
‘Ready?’ he asked, glancing at the neatly stacked suitcases standing against the wall.
She nodded mutely.
‘Nothing else?’ He seemed surprised, and Jemma forced her dilatory tongue to move.
‘I’ve left a few boxes of things in my room. Nothing important,’ she told him. ‘They can be picked up—whenever.’ Her accompanying shrug said she didn’t care.
‘Then they come now,’ he said decisively. ‘You won’t be coming back here again, Jemma.’
She shivered, the words having a much more final ring to them than just thinking them all night long had.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘NO,’ JEMMA refused outright, staring in horror at the room he was in the process of placing her suitcases in. ‘I won’t sleep with you, Leon!’
Turning, she stalked back down the stairs and into the sitting-room, where she stood staring angrily out of the window. How dared he? If it wasn’t bad enough him taking her straight from her flat to a private clinic where he proceeded calmly to stand right beside her while a top London gynaecologist put her through just about every embarrassing examination a woman could be subjected to, he was now just as calmly expecting her to share his bed!
‘I hate you!’ she whispered without turning when she heard him come into the room. ‘How could you be so bloody insensitive?’
‘Are we about to discuss our sleeping arrangements or the fact that I insisted on being present throughout your examination?’ By contrast he sounded smooth and beautifully cool!
‘Both!’ she snapped. ‘I find both intrusions on my privacy utterly distasteful!’
‘It is not the fact that I intrude on your privacy that you find so distasteful, Jemma,’ he argued drily. ‘It is the fact that I intrude at all!’
She went to deny it, then snapped her lips tight shut over the words. She did see him as an intruder, so much so that she was still trembling from the indignity of it all. She felt trapped, wrung out and trampled on. In less than twenty-four hours, Leon had completely taken over her right even to think for herself! And she was just beginning to understand what it was like to become a Leon Stephanades business take-over. The iron hand in the velvet glove! she called it helplessly, because he was doing it all with the kind of quiet authority she found impossible to fight against.
‘You could at least have shown some—taste and allowed me to lose my dignity in private!’ she threw tensely at him.
‘And what about my rights as a prospective father to be interested and concerned for you and the child?’ he countered. ‘You think it did not move me as deeply as it moved you to see the actual evidence of our child moving—living inside your womb? Yes...’ he taunted softly when his words surprised her enough to turn and stare at him. ‘I saw your expression when the scanner showed our perfectly formed child, agape mou. I saw the glow of pride and the more obvious feelings of relief when the good doctor assured us that everything is well. You think I did not experience the same emotions, should not be allowed to experience the same things?’
‘That isn’t what I meant!’
‘Isn’t it?’ He walked towards her, his expression grim suddenly as he made his usual statement by placing both hands on her swollen body. ‘We are a unit,’ he declared. ‘Three parts of one whole, joined by the irrefutable existence of our child—ours!’ he repeated with soft ferocity. ‘And the quicker you come to terms with that, the more comfortable we can all become with it!’
Comfortable? He honestly believed she would learn to be comfortable being with a man who could turn his back on the woman, yet was prepared to put up with her because she was suddenly the mother of his unborn child? ‘Which does not include my having to sleep with you!’ she declared stubbornly.
‘It does if we are to have any hope of making a success of this marriage,’ he said grimly.
‘We are not married yet!’
‘But we will be in two days’ time!’ Another shock announcement that set her poor head reeling. ‘And wherever you decide to sleep tonight, Jemma,’ he warned, ‘you will sleep with me from then on!’
He meant it. The hard flash of his eyes said he meant it, the possessive grip of his hands said he meant it, and the dark, angry sense of frustration she felt burning inside told her she just did not have a single say in it. But she had one last try. ‘Can’t you at least give me a little time to get used to the idea of us being together like this before I have to—?’
He was already shaking his head, grim-faced and immovable. Jemma sighed, feeling the threat of tears block her throat. ‘Then I repeat,’ she whispered thickly, ‘you are an insensitive brute!’
‘Perhaps,’ he conceded, coming down from anger to a rueful kind of self-mockery when he sensed her defeat. His hand moved from her body to her shoulders, then slid gently to her throat, his long fingers burrowing into her thick, shining hair to cup her nape and his thumbs gently pressing beneath her chin to bring her face up to meet the smile softening his eyes. Her heart flipped over, her senses beginning to buzz as the look awakened all those weaknesses she had always harboured for him. ‘Surely, agape mou,’ he murmured, ‘it is not so long ago that we slept together that you could have forgotten how good it was for both of us?’
‘I don’t remember sleeping much!’ she snapped, trying to fight both him and her own wayward feelings.