‘This argument is beginning to get a little tired, Heather.’ He took hold of her arm, and when she tried to shake him off held her a little harder, then he sighed and released her with an impatient shake of his head. He said heavily, ‘I’m going to try to be around as much as I possibly can, but inevitably there will be times when I physically can’t be.’
Reluctantly, Heather conceded that he was being realistic. ‘I just don’t like being manipulated,’ she told him tightly, at which he flung back his head and gave a roar of laughter.
‘You? Manipulated? Not a word that I would associate with you. If you don’t feel that you have the time or the inclination to help me out here, then I will get my personal assistant to house sit as necessary when I can’t be around. Naturally, Joanna wouldn’t be my first choice, because you are familiar with Daniel and I am reluctant to introduce him to a stranger, but the choice is yours.’
It was a choice in name only, she acknowledged, but she wasn’t going to cave in to his demands without laying down a few conditions of her own.
Before she could open her mouth, he added, ‘Naturally, I wouldn’t expect you to do it for nothing. You will be compensated financially. However much you want.’
‘In other words, you would become my employer, so to speak?’
Leo frowned, taken aback at having his generosity, as he saw it, thrown back in his face. And this was the woman who had caused him sleepless nights! Pay her a compliment, and she would fight like a wild cat to prove she had been insulted. Give her a bunch of flowers, and she would probably claw your eyes out! Narrow escape, he told himself again. And, when you’re busy fantasising about ripping off her clothes and losing yourself in that body of hers, just remember that the woman’s a hell cat. Nowhere was it written that having a relationship with a hell cat was the sort of calming experience a man needed.
‘In other words, I would recognise that having your life disrupted might interfere with your work, ergo a lack of income. End of story.’
Deprived of that line of argument, Heather huffed and then said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t dream of charging you for being here with Daniel if you’re not around—which isn’t to say that you have carte blanche to pop in now and again whenever it happens to suit you. And another thing—no women.’
‘Come again?’
‘No women.’
‘And why would that be?’
Heather’s cheeks flamed. ‘Because it would be disres—’
‘Climb off your high horse! I wouldn’t dream of bringing any women up here. But, as a matter of interest,’ he added, ‘would you be jealous? Because that’s just the sort of condition a jealous woman might consider.’ He laughed again, because now she looked fit to explode. Give her a second or two, and he would have to dodge some serious aerial bombardment from whatever heavy objects were to hand. He had been stressed out, but finally he was beginning to relax.
‘You really need to sit down and have a chat with your ego, Leo. If you let me know when you’re going to be away…’
‘Let you know? My life isn’t predictable like that. No, I have a much better idea. You move in, and that way we can both save ourselves a lot of trouble making phone calls or knocking on doors. That would seem the most sensible option, wouldn’t you agree?’
CHAPTER SIX
LESS than thirty-six hours later, Heather was standing in the sprawling hall of Katherine’s house, watching with her mouth open as Leo basically commandeered the place. The man hadn’t been kidding when he had told her that he didn’t let the grass grow under his feet. The house was teeming with people in uniforms who were efficiently doing all sorts of clever things to turn two of the downstairs rooms into offices. In the midst of this organised chaos, Leo was standing, mobile glued to his ear, giving hand commands to the men while he restlessly barked orders to some hapless soul on the other end of the line.
Heather had just come across to fetch some books for Katherine and a few changes of clothes, but she was transfixed by the scene unfolding in front of her.
Three men, bending under the weight of an enormous desk, jostled her from behind, and she let out a little yelp and sidestepped them.
Just then, Leo spotted her dithering by the front door and he snapped his mobile shut and headed in her direction.
Despite the cataclysmic changes to his routine, he was feeling pretty good. When he had told his mother that he would be moving into her house so that she need not worry about Daniel, he had been first surprised, then tickled pink by the exuberance of her gratitude. Daniel was his responsibility, after all, he had thought with a stab of guilt. How distant had he and his mother become that she would think that he might swoop in and out, leaving them all to muddle along the best they could? Notwithstanding, he had left the hospital feeling well disposed and in high spirits.
He had also, in an unprecedented U-turn, decided to change his plans. Instead of dipping in and out to the best of his ability, he would simply shift his working arena from London to his mother’s house. He wouldn’t be able to guarantee a one-hundred-percent attendance rate, but his movements would certainly be a little more predictable. He had felt good making that decision, and he felt good now, watching his stuff being shifted in, everything that would turn his mother’s den and little snug into a working environment suitable for him.
Heather, he noticed, was gulping like a fish out of water and looking as though she had barged into a scene from a science fiction movie.
‘What on earth is going on?’ she gasped when he was virtually on top of her.
‘What does it look like? I’m kitting out some work space for myself.’
And he wasn’t above getting down and dirty in the process, she noted, taking in the low-slung, faded jeans and the tee shirt, likewise faded; he was displaying all the signs of a man sweating at some manual labour.
In fact, her nostrils quivered at his rough, masculine scent. Whoever said that aftershave was a turn on?
‘You never said…’ she stammered, and he raised his eyebrows sardonically.
‘I didn’t think I had to run it by you to get permission first.’
‘That’s not what I meant! I just hadn’t expected that you would be moving in lock, stock and smoking barrel!’ She watched in horror as he stripped off the tee shirt and tossed it across the oak banister. Sure, it was hot and sure, he was sweaty and looked as though he had been lifting a few heavy objects, but was that really necessary? She dragged her eyes away from the fascinating sight of his bare chest, bronzed and muscled, his nipples flat and brown. To look at him now, no one could ever accuse him of being a soft, desk-bound money maker. In fact, he looked like a man born into manual work, and extremely challenging manual work. There wasn’t a spare ounce of flab on him. She cleared her throat nervously and pinned her eyes to his amused face.
‘Does Katherine know that you’re rearranging all her furniture?’ she snapped in a high voice. Now she sounded like a school mistress—prim, proper, disapproving. He was supposed to be the buttoned-up businessman, and she was supposed to be the easygoing artist. When had this role reversal occurred? she wondered feverishly. ‘I just thought that your presence here was going to be on a more casual basis, that’s all.’
‘I didn’t think that casual would work, given the circumstances. Care to have a look at the furniture rearrangements while you’re here? Then you can report back to my mother.’
‘Of course I’m not going to report back to your mother!’
‘No? It’s just that you suddenly seemed ablaze with self-righteous zeal.’
Heather scowled as, amused, he turned his back on her and began walking towards what had been Katherine’s snug and den. Self-righteous zeal? Not content with making her feel like Miss Haversham, he had now managed to reduce her to prissy schoolmarm with an overdeveloped streak of Puritanism.
And her body was still in a state of hyper-sensitivity at the sight of his semi-nudity.
Her legs unfroze from where they had been nailed to the floor and she tripped behind him, still scowling, to pull up short in front of a fully functioning office in progress. Ornaments, dainty bits of furniture, pot plants, all had been cleared away and replaced by modems, telephones, a fax machine and a small, flat-screen TV which constantly recorded the levels of the stock market. This was a male-dominated space now, and the dominating male was currently looking around him with an expression of satisfaction.
‘What do you think?’ Leo asked, spinning on his heels to face her. It was strange how much he enjoyed getting under her skin. Maybe it was pay back for her getting under his skin. And maybe there was an even bigger pay back to be had. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought as he watched her trying not to watch him, if her defences came crashing down even though she didn’t want them to? Wouldn’t it be satisfying if she found herself jumping from her moral high-ground even though her brain told her that she shouldn’t?
The brain, after all, was a strange thing. You could go blue in the face telling it to do something and it would just head off at a tangent and go its own merry way. Wasn’t that what had happened with him? He had sworn himself off her but, now that he was here, and that so was she, some inner devil he hadn’t known he possessed was playing mind-games with him—and he liked these mind-games. Hadn’t he always been big into sport, both of the intellectual and the physical variety?