The new Heather, however, sidled towards the Aga and busied herself concentrating on the pasta sauce which she had earlier prepared for herself, having thought that he would most likely be eating out in London before returning to the country.
‘There was no need for you to rush back,’ she said indistinctly to the thick Bolognese sauce. ‘I mean, I do understand that you have a job to do in London, and that job is going to prevent you from being here a hundred percent of the time. Don’t forget, I was married to a workaholic.’ She didn’t dare turn round, because she knew that her will power would be threatened the minute she saw him standing there, lean, mean and sexy beyond belief. Stirring the sauce was her cowardly way of buying time.
Leo frowned. This was hardly the rapturous response to which he had become accustomed and which he now took as a given. Maybe she was having an off day. He crossed the room, vaguely noticing the way she stiffened, and dismissed that fleeting observation as a trick of the light.
‘You were married to a creep,’ Leo asserted. He slipped his arms around her and nibbled the side of her neck. She was all creamy curves, and the knowledge of what lay under those clothes was a fierce turn on. When they had first slept together, she had been wildly aroused but still unsure of herself. She was out of practice, she had later confessed, and she had virtually apologised in case she had been a let down. Leo had been touched by that lack of self-confidence. Since then, with all her barriers truly down, she’d been the most passionate, most satisfying, hottest lay he had ever had. He couldn’t get enough of her. He frequently interrupted his working day so that he could seek her out and lose himself in her voluptuous body. When he wasn’t around her, he caught himself looking at his watch and projecting his thoughts to when she would be back in his arms.
Heather didn’t reply. Lust fired through her like a raging furnace, and her eyelids fluttered as she leaned back into him and stopped stirring the sauce, thereby losing whatever thread of helpful distraction it had offered her. She heard her own soft moan which caught in her throat as his hands began wandering the length of her body, unbuttoning her shirt to free her bare breasts which hung full and ripe and waiting to be touched. She gave another low moan as he began to caress her. She was barely aware of him easing her away from the Aga so that he could lean against the counter and continue to slowly manipulate her body from behind, notch by exquisite notch, towards a place of no return.
He was whispering into her ear, shredding her ability to think clearly as he began telling her what he wanted to do to her, where he wanted to touch her, how he wanted to touch her. By the time he slipped his hand under her gypsy-cotton skirt, her body was screaming for satisfaction, but he stopped her from turning around so that she could minister to him the way he was ministering to her, and she was too far lost in her own sensual pool to find the energy to resist him. She parted her legs and his fingers found the wet, slippery core of her and began stroking.
Her feverish response was an unstoppable force against which she had no resistance. She arched back, barely able to breathe, and when she eventually came her orgasm seemed to last for ever as she was tipped over the edge with shocking abandon. It seemed ages before she was once again earthbound, then she swivelled round to look at him, her face still flushed and her nipples still stiff and rosy with arousal.
‘This wasn’t meant to happen,’ she said unevenly, and Leo grinned at her.
‘Since when?’ Instead of taking her right here and right now, he would wait until later when they were in bed. He would savour the moment. ‘We’re combustible when we’re together. I like that.’
‘Yes, well…’ Her eyes skittered away from his lazy, searching gaze. ‘We—we need to talk, Leo.’
Leo frowned. ‘Talk? Now? What about?’
Heather could see that talking was probably the last thing he wanted to do.
‘There’s been a bit of an awkward development.’
‘What kind of awkward development?’ Alert to the nuances in her tone of voice, Leo was instantly on his guard as he rapidly sourced in his head what awkward development she might want to discuss with him. ‘Do I need to sit down for this?’ he asked abruptly. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him with that cautious, shuttered expression. He didn’t like finding that he had driven like a maniac to get here only to find his expectations of the evening going so drastically off-course. It struck him with unpleasant force just how much he had become accustomed to a certain pattern of behaviour between them, and how much he had come to enjoy that pattern.
For a man who had tried the whole domesticity thing and found it wanting, had fashioned a personal life that managed to escape the debilitating tedium of routine and the unacceptable consequences of commitment, Leo was unnerved to acknowledge how much routine had seeped into his relationship with Heather.
He couldn’t pinpoint when that had happened. He just knew that he enjoyed having her available for him, enjoyed the smile that lit up her face every time he looked at her.
‘If you like.’ Heather shrugged. Now that sex was off the menu, she could tell that he wasn’t best pleased. Wasn’t it the driving force behind their relationship, as far as he was concerned? That combustible passion that flared up whenever they were around each other?
He refilled his glass with wine and headed towards the sitting room. Already one thought was forming in his head, a suspicion which took shape and was fully developed by the time she closed the sitting room door quietly behind them.
‘Tell me.’ He walked towards the bay window and stared outside for a few seconds before turning round to face her. ‘That there hasn’t been a mistake.’
‘Mistake?’
‘Don’t play dumb with me, Heather,’ Leo intoned rawly. ‘You know what I’m talking about. We were careful all of the time.’
‘Most of the time,’ Heather corrected. She could see now where his mind was going, and the horror that would be unleashed should she tell him that she had accidentally fallen pregnant. Leo wasn’t in it for the long haul, and if she had ever needed proof positive of that fact then she had it now. She felt as though she was being sliced open, but she remained outwardly calm. ‘But I’m not pregnant, so you can breathe a sigh of relief.’
Having envisaged the worst, Leo was left oddly deflated by her denial. ‘Good,’ he said flatly. ‘Then what is it?’
‘I went to visit your mother in hospital today,’ Heather said slowly. ‘She’s spotted that there’s something going on between us. She’s been skirting round the subject the last couple of times I’ve been to see her, asking me what I thought of you, but today she asked outright.’
‘And you told her…what?’
‘I really did try to change the subject, but she wouldn’t let it go, and in the end I may have mentioned that…that we’ve become involved over the past couple of weeks.’
‘And that’s a problem because…?’
‘Because she believes that it’s more serious than it is.’ Heather thought it wise not to mention the extended conversation she had had, during which Katherine had poured her heart out about her misgivings over Leo’s first wife, about the rift Sophia had driven between the brothers, a rift that had already been in the making. She had told her all sorts of personal stuff—regrets she harboured that her eldest son had somehow grown to feel shut out over time from the family unit, which he had seen as indulging his younger brother, while from a young age failing to acknowledge the achievements of the older. Her misguided faith that the relationship between Leo and Heather, the wonderful changes she had seen in him, would signal a new beginning for Leo had had Heather scuttling out of the room, appalled at Katherine’s deductions.
‘Of course she doesn’t,’ Leo denied dismissively. ‘You’re reading way too much into the whole thing. And, now that that’s out of the way, why don’t we pick up where we left off in the kitchen?’ He moved towards her and Heather looked back at him with stubborn determination.
‘You weren’t there, Leo.’
‘I don’t need to have been. My mother has always known, since my marriage collapsed, that long-term relationships aren’t my thing.’
‘She’s a romantic. She’s clung to the notion that you’ve just been in search of the right woman. She said that Sophia wasn’t right for you and that you’ve just been waiting to open yourself up.’
‘To you?’
‘I’m only repeating what Katherine said.’ She could feel tears sting the back of her eyes.
Leo instantly recognised his mistake. He could see the hurt spread across her face, even though she made an effort to hide it, and an apology formed on his lips. But he remained silent because just the thought that other people might be playing around with notions of permanence on his behalf was an error he needed to correct. He had no intention of remarrying. If he hadn’t said so outright to his mother, then he had always assumed that she had got the message, or why else would he have spent all these years happily playing the field?