Hired for the Boss's Bedroom

Overall, not that good.

She picked up her paintbrush and began the delicate work of daubing colour onto the meticulously drawn illustration she had been working on for the past few days, but her mind was a million miles away.

She wondered how, in the space of only fifteen days, her harmless little fling had become her all-consuming obsession. Since when could a fling become such a big deal that she couldn’t actually see beyond it? Wasn’t it actually called a fling because it was something passing, something from which the recovery prospect was good—a bit like the common cold? And, that being the case, why was it occupying her every waking moment in what she could only think was a very unhealthy fashion?

She gave up on the illustration and instead swivelled her chair so that she could look out at the peaceful sunlit view through the windows, which had been flung open to allow in the balmy breeze.

With surprising astuteness, Leo had singled out the most appropriate room for her in which to paint. It was in the attic, a small space with a sloping roof and two generously sized ceiling windows, as well as the two long windows now open. The quality of natural light was unbelievable, and Heather had been quietly chuffed at his unerring instinct in sizing up the one place which she would be able to slot into with alarming ease.

In actual fact, she had been quietly chuffed at a surprising number of things in connection with Leo, starting with his choice of studio space for her, and ending with the amount of time he had devoted to being in the country—even though she knew that he probably had a heck of a lot of commitments in London, which he had doubtless put on hold so that he could be around for Daniel.

He had become a regular visitor to the hospital, where his mother was making a good recovery, and hadn’t blotted his copybook once with his son.

The debatable upside of all this time spent being the perfect son and father was that he had been around a lot more than she had anticipated. Often, they had breakfast first thing, and then he would shut himself away in his office while she retreated to her studio to paint. Except that the painting was often interrupted by the soft pad of his steps on the stairs, by the feel of his body as he bent to look over her shoulder at whatever she happened to be working on, by the brush of his lips when they inevitably found the curve of her shoulder.

They made love with an insatiable hunger that thrilled and frightened her at the same time.

Under the onslaught of his continual presence, she felt herself becoming deeper and deeper embroiled in a situation that was as far from being a fling as chalk was from cheese.

And now there were further complications which had been thrown into the mixture, complications which she would have to mention to him when he returned from London later that evening.

If things felt a little crazy, then she had no one to blame but herself. She had allowed a situation to develop and now what had been an exciting white-water ride had become a whirlpool which was sucking her down faster and faster. The worst of it was the shocking realisation that she wanted to be sucked under, she wanted to give herself totally and completely to him, and she wanted to do that because she had fallen in love with him.

She had blithely ignored all the warning signs which now rose up to stare her accusingly in the face. She had thought nothing of the way he had taken over her thoughts; the way he could make her laugh and relax in his company; the way she was tuned in to his presence before he even entered a room; the way she had found herself waking up in the mornings with a spring in her step and a song in her heart, like a character from a corny romantic movie.

Now, of course, with that missing jigsaw piece firmly in place, she could see just how and why her safe, cosy life had been first undermined and then dismantled. She felt sick at the prospect of picking up all the pieces once he disappeared back to his London life, with its glittering social whirlwind of high-level meetings and chic cocktail parties full of those sophisticated, glamorous power babes with whom he claimed to be bored. At the time, she had been thrilled to bits by that unguarded snippet of information.

Now, she reflected on why it had been so easy to be swept away by every small thing he had said. Hijacked by love, she had been pathetically quick to believe what she wanted to believe. He’d told her that the skinny, beautiful barristers bored him, and she’d guiltily translated it into meaning that she uniquely captured his attention. He’d told her that she made him laugh, which was rare for any woman, and she’d invested it with a significance which it really didn’t have. He hadn’t played any mind games with her because he hadn’t needed to. She had managed perfectly well on her own in undermining her pragmatic view of what they had.

She spent the rest of the day working on automatic while her mind went wild, freed from the constraints of pretending to herself that she was in control. By the time she sat with Daniel and supervised his prep, fed him and settled him into bed—noticing the way he now asked after his father when a couple of months ago the mere mention of Leo would have been enough to raise a scowl—her head was spinning.

She couldn’t remember ever feeling like this, as though she was entering scary, unchartered territory, even when her marriage had been at its lowest and she had realised that she would have to walk away from it.

Daniel had asked her when his father was due to return, to which she had replied vaguely, ‘Some time later, maybe around ten or so.’ In fact, it was shortly after eight when she heard the slam of the front door from where she was pouring herself a glass of wine in the kitchen while doing her best to get involved in a rather silly television-sitcom.

Leo was still ridding himself of his jacket as he strode into the kitchen. Most unlike him, he had hurried his meeting along, politely declining the usual drink afterwards to celebrate successful completion of a deal, and had spent the entire trip back to his mother’s house in the grip of a disconcerting type of eagerness. He had even been tempted to stop en route when he had happened to drive past a particularly charming florist in one of the nearby villages so that he could personally pick out a bunch of flowers for Heather. But he had managed to resist the extraordinary impulse. What the hell did he know about flowers, after all? His secretary usually saw to that type of thing. Except he knew rather more now about horticulture than he ever had before, having listened with amusement as Heather had acquainted him with all the flowers in her back garden, laughing when he’d told her that it was a sorry state of affairs for a woman in her mid-twenties to know the Latin names of plants.

He smiled when he saw her, his eyes roving possessively over her luscious body, and then he smiled some more when he saw the faint tinge of pink flood her cheeks at his hungry appraisal.

But first things first. He poured himself a glass of wine to join her and asked after Daniel.

‘Is he asleep yet?’ He extracted football tickets from his pocket and dangled them in front of her. ‘Ever seen gold dust? I give you these.’ With his eyes still trained on her, he placed the gold-dust tickets on the kitchen counter and lazily reached to pull her to him, murmuring into her hair that he had been thinking about her all day.

This, she thought, was how her defences had been so thoroughly overhauled. His softly spoken words and the feel of his body pressed against hers were lethal weapons. She shivered, wanting to break free, but stupidly clung to him with the glass of wine still in her hand.

He removed it from her, placed it next to his on the counter and did what he had been wanting to do since he had left the house at the ungodly hour of five-thirty in the morning. He kissed her with a thoroughness that had her whimpering and cleaving to him, and hating herself for doing both, when firstly she wanted to talk to him and secondly she knew that she was just digging herself deeper into a hole.

But he turned her on! He undid three buttons on her shirt and slid his hand expertly to cover one of her breasts. She made no move to stop him. The air felt as though it was being sucked out of her lungs; it always did the minute he laid a finger on her. She moaned as he began to play with the jutting nub of her nipple. When he licked his finger and returned it to her roused nipple, she could feel the dampness there race to every part of her body, until she felt like a rag doll that had to be propped up for fear of falling.

‘The gold dust might have to wait until morning,’ she said shakily, edging apart from him. Her breast was still exposed from where he had fished it out of her shirt, the big, pink disc of her nipple gleaming slickly from his wet fingers. She hurriedly did up her buttons and moved to rescue her drink from the counter. ‘I wasn’t sure what time you were going to be back, so I told him it was better not to wait up.’

‘I got here as quickly as I could,’ Leo admitted roughly, thinking back to the unholy haste with which he had dispatched his legal team and headed for his car parked in the basement of his vast office in Central London. He took a sip of his wine and shot her one of those wolfish smiles that could make her toes curl. He walked to the kitchen door and quietly closed it. ‘Usually, I wrap up a deal with a slap-up meal with the team. Tonight all I could think about was getting back here. Explain that to me, if you will.’

The old Heather, the one that had existed yesterday, would have basked in that lazy, sexual appraisal that had her pulses racing and her heart beating like a hammer inside her. She wouldn’t have cared less about explaining anything. She would have strolled over to where he was still standing by the door, watching her with proprietorial hunger. She would have reached up on her tiptoes as she melted against the hard muscularity of his chest, tilted her face to his with her eyes half-closed, and she would have let her body give him whatever answers he wanted to hear.