His thoughts were pleasant company for the duration of the journey which flew past, because at such a late hour there was little traffic on the roads. By the time he finally arrived at the house it was very late, but the outside light was on and there was a welcoming air to the place which, he had to admit, was lacking in his apartment. There was something to be said for the crunch of gravel under the wheels of a car, and the soft murmur of a breeze that didn’t carry the sounds of ambulances, police cars and fire engines.
Letting himself in and standing still for a few seconds so that his eyes could adjust to the darkness, Leo quietly placed his computer case on the ground and then silently moved towards the curving banister. There was no point turning on all the lights. Heather and Daniel would both be asleep. He might have the kind of constitution that needed very little sleep, but he could appreciate that most people were not built like him, especially children.
By any standards, his mother’s house was big. The first floor housed myriad rooms, including a small sitting-room. It had struck Leo, when he had looked over the floor plans from the Estate agency, as very handy for an older person. His mother could watch television at night without having to trek upstairs to get to her bedroom. It was now shrouded in darkness. He was glancing absentmindedly through the half-open door when the blow to his shoulder blades caught him by surprise and had him reeling against the wall. He regained his control and swung round, fists clenched in anticipation of teaching whoever had hit him from behind a lesson they wouldn’t forget any time soon.
He knew it was Heather by her height; nothing else could be made out because the corridor was in complete darkness. He reached out and grabbed her hand before the five-inch thick, hardback book could deliver another well-aimed blow.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Between swinging her hand and the book making contact with the intruder—an encyclopaedia of the type now virtually extinct, thanks to the Internet, but still in plentiful supply in Katherine’s library—it had clicked in Heather’s head that the intruder in question was Leo.
She hadn’t had time to pull back from hitting him with cracking accuracy between his shoulder blades, which he was now rubbing with one hand.
She couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but she didn’t think he would be smiling indulgently at her mistake.
‘I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t be here!’
‘Why are you always so shocked when I show up in my own house?’
‘It’s not technically your house, and you told me that you were going to be away for the night. I…I heard a noise…’
‘I tried to be as quiet as possible!’
Heather could feel her heart beating like a drum inside her. Having spent the entire evening thinking about him, to see him now, towering over her, made her feel as though the oxygen was being sucked out of her body. He was like an addiction, and when he was around every ounce of her felt alive. She wondered whether he was aware that she was trembling.
‘That’s just it…I’m a light sleeper. I heard something, and I assumed it was a burglar.’
‘So you just rushed out here, armed with…what is it? One of my mother’s books?’ Leo felt a rising tide of anger rush through him as he contemplated the consequences of her stupidity, had he indeed been a burglar. ‘A…let’s have a look now.’ He relieved her of the book and pushed the light switch on the wall. ‘Oh yes; an encyclopaedia of plants. Just the thing you’d need to protect yourself and Daniel against someone who might have been carrying a gun. Or a knife.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’ And she wasn’t doing too well in the thinking stakes now either. Leo looked neither tired nor crumpled after his long drive out of London. In fact, he looked infuriatingly wide awake and every inch the staggeringly sexy alpha-male that had haunted her thoughts. Realising that she was inappropriately clad in her dressing gown, which she had hurriedly shoved over her shortie pyjamas, Heather pulled the cord tightly around her middle. But even that gesture of modesty couldn’t staunch the tingling feeling in her nipples or the dryness in her mouth. She was crazily conscious of his masculinity as he continued to look at her with frowning concentration.
‘Well, you damn well should have!’
‘Lower your voice! You’re going to wake Daniel!’
‘I’m not finished with you. We can carry on this conversation downstairs.’
‘I’m not coming downstairs with you. I’m tired. I want to get back to my bed.’
‘Tough. Follow me.’ He spun round on his heels, and after a few seconds of agonised indecision Heather grudgingly followed him down the staircase, still clutching her robe tightly around her as if afraid that it might fly open of its own volition and expose her swollen, tender breasts and stiff, aroused nipples. Her thoughts were everywhere, but she knew that there was no way she would get any sleep that night if she didn’t pursue the conversation to its natural conclusion.
Instead of heading to the kitchen, where she expected he might want to make himself a cup of coffee, he peeled away towards one of the three sitting-rooms on the ground floor, and the only one which was actually used.
‘You could have been killed,’ he told her abruptly, moving to switch on a lamp on one of the many coffee tables before taking up position on the squashy, flowered sofa.
‘You could have been killed on the way here,’ Heather immediately countered. ‘You could have lost control of your car and wrapped yourself round a tree.’
‘Impossible. Sit. Please.’
‘So you do remember what I said about not liking being ordered around.’ She perched on the side of the sofa, simply because she didn’t care for the thought of arguing with him across the width of the room in the early hours of the morning. ‘What do you think your mother would have done in my position, if she had heard a noise? And it’s happened before, for your information. Okay, it might just have been the house creaking, but she’s done exactly what I did.’
‘She told you that? She never told me. When did this happen?’
‘The last time was several months ago, shortly after Daniel had arrived. She probably would have hunkered down and ignored the creak, but when there’s a child in the house hunkering down isn’t an option—and, short of sleeping with a gun under the pillow, you just have to use what you’ve got to hand.’
‘I will need to do something about this. Why didn’t she mention anything to me? No, scrap that question.’
Heather saw the flash of painful realisation that Katherine had kept quiet because she hadn’t wanted to bother her busy son who had no time for her or her life in the country which was so far removed from his.
‘It’s a big house, Leo,’ she said awkwardly. ‘And it’s old. Big, old houses make noises, and they can be a little creepy at night.’
‘I had the most sophisticated alarm-system installed when the house was bought,’ Leo pointed out, frowning.
‘Katherine doesn’t like to switch it on at night. She thinks she might wake up in the middle of the night to get something to drink and set if off by mistake.’
‘Right.’
‘Also, Daniel might, as well, and he’d be terrified if he set it off.’
‘So you prefer to make use of the encyclopaedia of plants instead?’
She knew that he would be having a hard time understanding, probably never having been scared of anything in his life. ‘It’s pretty heavy.’
‘I can’t see my mother having the strength to lift it.’
‘She probably uses the concise version.’
Leo looked at her and then threw back his dark, arrogant head and laughed. When he stopped laughing, the atmosphere had subtly changed. There was a sudden, charged intimacy in the air between them, and Heather found that she was holding her breath, riveted by his proximity and unable to tear her shamefully hungry eyes away from his face.
‘You make me laugh,’ Leo admitted roughly. ‘Not many people do. I like that.’
Heather felt disproportionately good at that confession. This was what he did to her. He made her feel like a woman and not just like a faceless, sexless person who helped out at charity fund-raisers, pursued her isolated career, tended her garden and helped out at the local school. He made her feel wanton and youthful, and she had forgotten how that felt. Even when she had been married to Brian she had not felt that.
‘And you make me feel…’ She ran out of steam, and her half-finished sentence hung tantalisingly in the air between them.
‘How? How do I make you feel? I’ll take a couple of guesses here—angry? Pissed off?’
‘That as well.’
‘As well as what?’
‘I…I should go back to bed.’
‘No, you don’t. You’re not doing a runner on me, Heather,’ Leo growled, catching her arm and pulling her back before she could take flight.
Heather gave a little yelp of dismay as she lost her precarious balance and toppled back onto the sofa, half-falling against him, and then stumbling frantically to right herself, in the process coming into way too much contact with his body for her liking.