Oh, yes, now it was all flooding back.
And quite suddenly, totally unexpectedly, the unbearable tension twisting his muscles snapped and Leo felt like laughing.
The cheek of the woman. The bloody cheek. All that talk about discretion and the implicit questioning of his integrity, delivered with such an air of superiority from up there on the moral high ground, and yet if anything she ought to be the one asking for his discretion and apologising for the near lapse in her integrity. Because if he wasn’t mistaken—and this time he didn’t think he was—she’d been about to kiss him. While he’d been asleep. And if that didn’t smack of lack of judgement, lack of professionalism, he didn’t know what did.
She’d so nearly got away with it, and he’d bet everything he had that she thought she still had, but she was wrong. Very wrong, because there was no way he was letting this go. Absolutely no way.
And just like that, Leo felt better than he had all night, all week, maybe even all month. He felt more awake, more alert, more alive because this was going to be fun, and as fun was something he hadn’t had in a long, long time he was going to savour every single second.
And as all kinds of new and tempting possibilities streaked through his head, he thought with almost dizzying relief that for the first time since he and Abby had met he was back on form, ahead of the game and one hundred per cent back in control.
* * *
Her scent was a bit of an odd thing for a man like Leo to fixate on, Abby would have thought, but if that was what floated his boat, that was fine with her. She just wanted to get home, give her body some much-needed respite from everything it had undergone this evening, and put the night behind her.
‘Before we go,’ he said mildly, ‘there’s something I’d like to know.’
Abby glanced up and something about the way he was looking at her had every instinct she had leaping to attention.
Uh-oh.
What was going on now? Because the words were spoken casually enough but she didn’t like the look of that smile. Or his stance. At all.
His expression, his eyes, were still unreadable but something about him seemed to have changed. He radiated a kind of energy that she hadn’t noticed before, a sense of tight control, and she got the spine-tingling impression that he’d become...well, not predatory, exactly, but there was no doubt that he was training every drop of his attention on her, planning, and sort of waiting, although she couldn’t imagine what for.
‘What is it?’ she said cautiously, not at all sure she wanted to know.
He dug his hands into the pockets of his trousers and fixed her with a look that for some reason made her want to squirm. ‘What happened between you coming into my bedroom and me waking up?’
Oh. For a nanosecond Abby went still, but then she forced herself to relax, cut the eye contact and continue with her buttons because there was absolutely no way he could know. No. Way.
‘What do you mean, what happened?’ she muttered, frowning and biting her lip in the hope that she looked as if she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘Nothing happened.’
‘Talk me through it,’ he said lazily. ‘Humour me.’
‘Couldn’t I humour you on Monday?’ she said, flashing him a quick, cool smile. ‘It’s late and I’ve had a long day.’
‘Surely it shouldn’t take too long.’
Deciding that if she carried on protesting he’d think—rightly—that she had something to hide, Abby looked at him for a second and then narrowed her eyes as if trying to remember. ‘OK, fine,’ she said, tapping her forefinger against her mouth and focusing on a spot somewhere high above his right shoulder. ‘Now, let me think. Ah, yes. I knocked. There was no answer so I went in. Saw you lying there and gave you a prod then a shake, upon which you woke up.’
‘You didn’t need to be on your knees to do that.’
‘I thought something might have happened to you. Something bad, perhaps fatal. Silly, I suppose,’ she said, going a bit red because with hindsight it had been, ‘but what with the alcohol, I wanted to check you were OK.’
He nodded, his eyes glinting in the dim light. ‘I see. And then?’
‘I told you. I poked you and then you woke up.’
‘Just like that?’
‘After a bit of an effort on my part. I had to shake you hard.’
‘So why did you need to lean in so close?’
She froze, her mouth going dry. Did he know? No, he couldn’t. ‘I didn’t.’ She frowned, as if running over the scene for the first time all evening, as if it weren’t etched probably permanently into her memory. ‘Well, I suppose I may have leaned in a bit,’ she amended, wondering how far ‘a bit’ could stretch. ‘Just to check your breathing and your pulse, but I wouldn’t call it close.’
‘And you didn’t whisper my name?’