‘Letty’s tired,’ Leo murmured, rearranging his bride like the floppy rag doll she resembled when her legs threatened to slide off him again.
‘Leo…’ Letty looked up at him with a sunny laidback smile.
Letty wasn’t tired: she was drunk.
‘I’m taking you home.’
‘Party pooper,’ she mumbled, burying her face in his neck. ‘You need a shave but gosh, you do smell amazing…’
Disconcerted, Leo grinned.
‘Letty never drinks. We egged her on,’ someone said.
‘We wanted her to have fun.’
Leo gazed down at her, long brown fingers brushing her tousled hair off her brow. ‘Did you have a good time?’
Letty made an admirable effort to sit up without the support of his arm. ‘I had a fabulous time,’ she told her companions with careful diction. ‘Thank you all for coming.’
‘I’m dizzy,’ she complained on the stairs.
‘Of course you are,’ Leo assured her.
‘I’m not drunk.’
‘Only well-refreshed,’ Leo incised.
‘I don’t want to go home like this.’
‘I’m taking you home with me,’ Leo told her smoothly. ‘It’s too late to phone your mother.’
‘I’ll text her. She won’t sleep until I’m home or she’s heard from me.’ Letty sighed, pulling out her phone and discovering that she was all fingers and thumbs and that it was a battle to focus.
While she texted she swayed and Leo breathed in deep and slow. She was a vision, honey-blonde hair tangled and falling round her, crystal tiara lurching to one side, green eyes myopic in their intensity, her classic profile taut with concentration.
When she had finished, Leo scooped her off her feet and she exclaimed, ‘I can walk perfectly well!’
‘Not in those heels you can’t,’ Leo assured her as he settled her into the limousine, relieved that no paparazzi had been awaiting them outside. ‘Imagine if you broke an ankle—’
‘And then we couldn’t get married!’ Letty pointed out. ‘Let me go back and break an ankle before we make the biggest mistake of our lives!’
‘I don’t make big mistakes,’ Leo intoned, recognising the hint of panic in her wide gaze before stretching across her to grab the seat belt and secure it firmly around her, the fingers of one lean brown hand brushing against a slender thigh as he did so. ‘All you’re suffering from is an attack of cold feet.’
Letty shivered, goosebumps breaking out at that fleeting and entirely accidental touch. She looked up into smouldering dark golden eyes and her breath was held suspended in her throat for a long timeless moment. Close up, his eyes were stunning, an absolutely riveting mixture of tawny shades and those lashes made her weak at the knees. The portrait of the beautiful brunette on the landing in his house was of his late mother. The resemblance between mother and son was arresting, particularly around the eyes. She wondered what his father looked like because, having had a glimpse of Leo’s mother, she wasn’t at all surprised that Leo had the flawless beauty of a dark angel.
‘Besides, I’d take you even with a broken ankle,’ Leo told her huskily. ‘Popi says you read much better stories than I do.’
‘Sybella likes the same one over and over again but Popi needs more stimulation,’ Letty muttered unevenly, oxygen seesawing in and out of her lungs as though she had been running because, that close to Leo’s raw masculinity, she felt weak and breathless. ‘And Cosmo only listens if you put pictures of cars or trains in front of him.’
Leo studied her flushed face, the languorous fresh green eyes welded to his, and he tensed and shifted in his seat, disturbingly aware of how aroused he was by her. The sight of her, so relaxed and confiding, was incredibly sexy. He was striving very hard not to relive those few staggering moments when he had seen her twirling round that pole with fluid grace and a sensuality that had taken him wholly by surprise.
‘I’d listen if you were on that pole,’ Leo muttered in a driven undertone. ‘Sexiest show I ever saw.’
Letty frowned at him, her disapproval palpable. ‘It was exercise, Leo. I went to classes for years and found it a great way of keeping fit and strong. It’s not sexy, except to a certain type of man.’
‘You were sexy,’ Leo told her before she could christen him a pervert.
Her eyes widened because no man had ever given her that label before and it knocked her off balance. She had always been the sensible, practical one in her circle of friends, the one who looked after her mates and guarded the drinks and the handbags. She didn’t know how to be sexy, had occasionally envied those to whom it came naturally but had ultimately decided that she was happier having her brains.