‘Leo, please,’ Heather pleaded in growing confusion. Was he jealous? Those were the enraged, possessive remarks of a jealous lover, but since when had Leo been either possessive or jealous? There was also something else going on here. The air felt thick and heavy with threat.
‘Love birds? You must be joking, Leo! I told you, Heather and I were just talking.’
‘About what? What conversation is so intimate that it requires you to be entwined with one another?’
‘We weren’t entwined,’ Heather protested, while her heart continued to beat out an erratic tattoo.
They had leapt apart like guilty lovers, Leo thought irrationally, and the more they defended themselves the more culpable they seemed to him. Rage was coursing through him like a toxin. He didn’t know where it was coming from. He could almost taste it in his mouth, and he had to breathe deeply to regain some of his formidable self-control.
Was it his imagination or did she look ever so slightly tousled? This was the woman who three days ago had confessed her love for him, shocking him with her honesty. He had felt as though a gauntlet had been laid down, and it had not been one which he had been inclined to take up. He had never given her the slightest inclination that there could be a future between them. Not only had she chosen to disregard that glaring point of truth, but she had stubbornly refused the two options which had been left open to her—either slink away with a discreet lack of fuss, or else put aside her silly dreams and continue their relationship, which would have been his preferred path. She must have known, he had told himself repeatedly, that to fling all her cards on the table would put him in an untenable position.
He was a man who was not fashioned for long-term relationships. Hadn’t he made that perfectly clear to her during the time they had spent together? More than with any previous woman, he had actually opened up to her under direct questioning, and had told her certain things about his marriage which had previously been kept in his own private terrain. Of course, he had not told her everything, but combined with everything else—and no one could say that he hadn’t been upfront from the start—the least she could have done was take the hint.
Women, the very few who had ever dared to nurture inappropriate ambitions as far as he was concerned, always but always took the hint.
He had spent three days telling himself that he had to be ruthless when it came to this one woman who had dared to crash through the barriers he had carefully, over time, constructed around himself.
He had decided that he would have one final conversation with her, clear the air.
The last thing he had expected was to walk in on her and his brother cuddled up on his mother’s sofa in virtual darkness.
Thinking about that now, Leo banged on the lights and proceeded to look first at her and then at his brother.
‘I didn’t think you would be back tonight.’ Heather filled the awkward silence with the worst choice of explanation and the taut lines of Leo’s face darkened further.
He hadn’t expected to find her still at the house, and this was the last thing he needed to hear. Was this how she was managing to deal with her unrequited love? He was besieged by a host of unpleasant, conflicting emotions. He had never before been aware that he was a man who had a comfort zone, a place which was inaccessible to the rest of the human race. He was now keenly aware that she had managed to barge right into it, because he didn’t feel himself, and it wasn’t because his brother was back on the scene.
Leo found that when he tried to think about it his brain seemed to shut down, leaving him floundering in a morass of weirdly unanswerable questions. He didn’t like it. It distracted him from the purity of his rage, forced him to ask why exactly he was so enraged. Was it just the thought that she might have declared her love for him—and she hadn’t been lying about that, because hadn’t he been the one who had sensed it, probably even before she had herself?—only to find herself in thrall to his brother, of all people?
‘Where did you think I would be?’
‘Katherine said that you had gone to London. It’s so late; I thought you might have stayed there overnight.’ Even with his face stony cold and her emotions all over the place, Heather was vitally aware of that leashed power and grace that was so hypnotic. His impact on her was so powerful that it made her feel giddy. ‘I…I should leave. You and your brother probably have a lot of catching up to do.’
In his mind’s eye, Leo was tormented by the picture of them sitting together in a darkened room, so close to one another that you couldn’t have put a cushion between them. Normally adept at eliminating anything that threatened to disturb his much-valued equilibrium, he was finding it impossible to erase the distasteful memory from his head.
He made himself look at Alex. By active choice, he had only seen him a handful of times over the years and it struck him that, yes, his brother was a man who might seem to him lightweight but to some women could easily appear appealing. He looked vaguely unruly, just the sort to ride his battered motorbike around the world. Just the sort to be on Heather’s wavelength. A free spirit. His tension ratcheted up a notch and a sense of purpose crystallised inside him like a block of ice.
‘Yes,’ Leo agreed, unsmiling. ‘But, first, let me apologise for misunderstanding a situation.’ He turned to Heather and forced himself to smile. ‘You’ll have to excuse a lover for being a little jealous.’
Lover? Wasn’t ex-lover a more fitting description of their current status? She looked at him in total bewilderment. Jealous? She would have been more capable of appreciating that startling sentiment if she wasn’t presently feeling as though she had somehow been transported to a parallel universe.
‘But—but—’ she stammered in utter confusion as he began walking slowly towards her. She glanced across to Alex, who seemed as perplexed as she was, and then back to Leo.
So she had confided all in his brother. Leo caught that exchanged glance, and at once read the situation as it really was. She had been pouring her heart out to Alex. The jealous rage that had swept over him had been misplaced. She loved him. The certainty of that knowledge, while frustrating—because he could have spared himself his momentary lapse in self-control—was surprisingly soothing. For once he didn’t mind being wrong about a situation.
‘A lover’s tiff,’ he threw at his brother while moving to curl his long fingers in Heather’s hair. It felt good. Better than he would have imagined possible. It also felt right, which was odd, considering he had spent three days building up a strong case for talking to her without the interference of emotions about where exactly she had gone wrong in trying to pin him down.
He felt himself harden, and it was an effort to bring himself down from that sudden surge of hot arousal. It was her proximity, the tempting fullness of her half-opened mouth.
Unable to resist, he lowered his head and took her mouth with his. ‘You’ve been crying,’ he murmured against her lips. ‘Was it because of me?’
‘Leo, no…’ Heather pushed him, but she was trembling so hard and he was an immovable force. He caught her fluttering hands in his and repeated his softly spoken question, demanding an answer, and when she gave an imperceptible nod he was momentarily overwhelmed by a surge of pure, primitive triumph.
Heather couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes, but she could sense his satisfaction at her miserable, grudging surrender, and she pulled back angrily. She forgot that Alex was still in the room. Leo could do that to her, make her forget everything, and he was doing it now. For what? To prove that he could? He didn’t love her and he didn’t want her, but maybe he just didn’t care for the thought of her wanting someone else. He was a man who had become accustomed to absolute and supreme control. His high-octane, hugely successful financial acumen had won him an army of yes men, and his ludicrously powerful sex appeal had enabled him to snap his fingers and have any woman sprinting in his direction. So now that same desire to control would doubtless dictate that she pine for him.
She glared up at his arrogantly smug face and stamped down on her body’s weak, automatic response to his proximity. She was shaking as she wrenched herself away from him.
‘I fell for you, Leo,’ she told him, keeping her voice low, controlled and steady. ‘And, sure, right now I’m a little down in the dumps. But I won’t be crying for you for the rest of my life. I’ve already cried over one failed relationship.’
‘Don’t even think of putting me in the same bracket as your ex! I’ve already told you that the man was a creep!’
‘We were too young when we married, and he was weak. Since when are you any different?’
‘I’m a one-woman man,’ Leo responded comfortably, still riding high on the notion that she had been crying over him. Of course, he abhorred the thought of her being unhappy—but being unhappy on his behalf was a hell of a lot better than flinging herself into someone else’s arms as a method of recovery. ‘I don’t play the field when I know that there’s a woman keeping my bed warm for me.’
‘You’re a one-woman man for just as long as it suits you,’ Heather flung back at him, taking another step backwards and folding her arms. ‘You talk a lot about making sure never to give a woman the wrong idea, but I think you quite enjoy the thought that you can get them into a position where they’d do anything for you. ‘Course, that gets boring after a while, but when you walk away you can always remind them that you never promised them anything.’