‘Are you sure you can’t make it to my engagement party on Saturday?’ Elexis pressed, big brown eyes pinned to Leo as though he hung the moon.
‘Unfortunately, we have a prior engagement,’ Leo countered. ‘My new nightclub is opening up in Athens on Saturday.’
Elexis looked pained. ‘But I thought that was next week.’
‘I moved it forward. Saturday is Letty’s birthday… It seemed fitting to change the date,’ Leo suggested lazily, spreading his hand across Letty’s taut spine and guiding her towards the woman waiting to welcome them.
‘How did you know it was my birthday?’ Letty whispered.
‘Marriage licence,’ Leo told her as they were ushered into a large showroom, shown to seats and offered champagne.
‘And you moved the opening date forward?’ Letty questioned in disbelief. ‘Because of my birthday?’
‘You’re my wife. It seemed appropriate, even if it did cast the organisers into a loop.’
‘And we’re attending this event together?’ Letty prompted.
‘Even I would not leave you alone to celebrate your birthday,’ Leo chided as models began to stroll out of the changing rooms behind the small catwalk and strut their stuff. It was an entertaining show, but Letty was intimidated by the height and slenderness of the models and could not picture her more ordinary self wearing such elegant, exclusive garments.
Leo, however, had no such inhibitions. He signalled the designer and indicated the outfits he preferred, seemingly impervious to the reality that she was very different in shape from the models and would not look the same.
An assistant escorted her into a changing room to be measured and within a very short space of time she was trying on clothes and the tailor was taking note of the adjustments to be made. A rack of lingerie was brought to her to try on next.
Her phone buzzed while she was striving not to think about Dido, who was clearly an ex of Leo’s. It was a text from Leo.
Come out and model the lingerie for me.
Letty was aghast at that suggestion, and the thought of displaying herself that way for Leo made her grow uncomfortably hot. Wide-eyed and flushed, she studied her reflection in the mirror. She was wearing a very pretty bra and briefs combination in pale blue. The bra fitted much better than the bras she usually wore. In fact, it seemed that she had been wearing the wrong size for years.
What’s made you so shy?
And Letty went pink. It was as if the wretched man was inside her head, rooting about and forcing her insecurities into the light of day.
In her head was an image of Elexis, pencil-thin in tangerine, and Dido, curvy but still skinny in all the right places with long legs. Letty was different, shorter and rounder, but she was still the woman Leo wanted, the woman he had made passionate love to the night before.
Only love had had nothing to do with it, she reminded herself ruefully. Even so, bodies came in all shapes and sizes and she did not like to acknowledge that she had a poor body image or low self-esteem. It was just… Her brow furrowed until she understood herself better. It occurred to her, for the very first time, that she was actually quite shy but that the need to focus on other people throughout her life had blinded her to that truth. And the women around Leo, the women he had actually been with, seemed so ridiculously beautiful that she was intimidated and shrank from the comparisons.
Enough was enough, Letty decided on the back of that lowering thought, stepping out of the changing room with a sway to her hips and an angle to her chin. And Leo, sprawled in his chair looking bored and clearly not expecting her, sat up with a jerk, stunned by her response to his challenge. And Letty liked that reaction; she liked it very much. She strolled across to the table and lifted her champagne to sip it, gloriously aware that Leo could not take his spectacular dark golden eyes from her.
‘So, basic is what turns you on,’ Letty murmured with a rueful sigh.
‘Pretty much,’ Leo admitted, his attention welded to that wondrous hourglass shape of hers and the swell of her breasts.
‘At least that’s fairly normal,’ Letty conceded, empowered by the reality that Leo, basic or otherwise, was visibly aroused. ‘At one stage early on I did wonder if you were insisting on keeping a mistress because you were into some sort of kink—’
Leo almost choked on his champagne and hurriedly set down the glass. ‘Kink?’ he stressed, his gorgeous eyes bright with disbelief.
‘It was a fair enough assumption when I didn’t know you,’ Letty parried, cool as a cucumber now. ‘Want to see anything else?’
‘Surprise me again… You keep on doing that,’ Leo breathed, studying her with intense dark golden eyes. ‘I didn’t think you’d have the nerve to come out.’
Letty sashayed back to the changing room wearing a grin she wouldn’t have shown him for a million pounds. She emerged again in a black set ornamented with shocking pink lace and Leo lounged back in his chair to enjoy the show.
‘You do realise that I’m likely to jump you in the limo after this?’ he murmured thickly.
‘Promises…promises,’ Letty countered with a roll of her green sea glass eyes and with more daring than she had known she possessed.
‘I can’t wait that long,’ Leo breathed, striding into the changing room in her wake and catching her into his arms before she could guess his intention.