Hired for the Boss's Bedroom (8 page)

She could feel his cool, watchful eyes on her and she wished that she could read what he was thinking. Why did he have to be so damned complex? Why couldn’t he have done her the favour of just fitting into the handy box in her head?

‘The point is…’ She stood up awkwardly. ‘Look, I can’t have this type of conversation here.’

‘Oh, but I thought the kitchen was the best bet.’

‘If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, then that’s fine. You know where the door is.’

‘Oh, don’t think you’re going to get off that easily,’ Leo grated. ‘I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.’

He followed her into the sitting room where she proceeded to stand by the window, hugging herself and keeping as far away from him as possible. Outbursts and melodrama were two things he had no time for, but for some reason wild horses wouldn’t have dragged him away from whatever lame story was about to unfold. If this was some kind of ruse to inveigle him into making promises he would inevitably fail to keep, however sexy her body was, then she was barking up the wrong tree, and he would enjoy telling her so in no uncertain terms. He should have guessed that she was all about flowers, chocolate and romance. He should have guessed it from the home-spun furnishings and the picture-postcard garden. She didn’t know how the real world worked, but how could she, caught up in her own imaginary world of illustration, living in the middle of the countryside where life evolved at such a slower pace?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Heather said, starting somewhere in the middle, ‘whether you fancy me or I fancy you.’

‘And why would that be? I’m all ears. Because there’s a higher plane somewhere? Some spiritual nirvana we should all be aiming for?’ He had sat down on the sofa, legs crossed. She had switched on a couple of lamps and the room was bathed in a warm, mellow glow. The shadows made her look all the softer, more vulnerable, more unbearably feminine. He looked past her to the mantelpiece, which was cluttered with pictures in various size of frame. A hallmark of the incurable romantic, he thought cynically. There was no mantelpiece in his penthouse apartment and, if there had been, it certainly wouldn’t have been groaning under the weight of photos.

‘Because I used to be married!’ There. It was out in the open now, and the silence that greeted her revelation was deafening. She could almost sense Leo’s brutally sharp mind trying and failing to take it in.

‘You were
married
?’ he asked. He didn’t know why he found that so shocking, but he did.

‘To a man called Brian.’ Having intended to leave out all extraneous detail, Heather was now overcome with the urge to divulge every miserable second of her disillusioning experience. ‘I…We were…I suppose you could say that we were childhood sweethearts. Went to the same secondary school, started going out when I was seventeen and he was eighteen, although we’d known each other long before then. Grew up together, you might say.’

Leo had said, in a voice that had been thick with sarcasm, that he was going to be all ears, that he couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say. He hadn’t expected this.

‘You were married,’ he repeated slowly.

‘Yes. Haven’t I just told you that?’

‘I’m finding it hard to take in.’

‘Why?’ Because, she thought, he didn’t think she really had what it took to get a guy for keeps? ‘No, scrap that.’

‘Because a husband isn’t usually something most women keep to themselves, even husbands who are no longer on the scene.’ He didn’t add that most divorced women were fond of getting the sympathy vote and complaining about husbands who had left them high and dry—or maybe that was just his cynicism speaking, having been out with a couple of divorcees in the past, neither of which had lasted longer than three months apiece. Who wanted to spend what little free time they had listening to a woman ranting about her ex? ‘Where is he now?’ Leo asked.

He was already envisaging the type of guy she might have married, working out why she was so keen on fighting him. Once bitten, twice shy.

‘In Hong Kong, as a matter of fact.’

‘Hong Kong? What the hell is your ex-husband doing in Hong Kong?’

‘You’re amazed that I was married. You’re amazed that my ex-husband lives in Hong Kong. You don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?’ Heather asked coldly, although there were tears just below the surface. She was remembering how she had failed to fit in to city life. The higher Brian had climbed, the more she had been left behind. She just hadn’t been the right sort of woman. Why on earth was she feeling hurt because Leo was finding it hard to believe that she might ever have had a life outside the country cottage and the gardening interests?

‘It has nothing to do with whether or not I have a high opinion of you.’
Married? Hong Kong?
He had managed to swallow his stupefaction that the woman had an ex in tow; had rapidly concluded that the hapless guy, the teenage sweetheart, must have been a country lad, had done whatever country lads did for a living—sheep farming, possibly—Heather would have become bored with him, with the monotony of being a farmer’s wife…The familiar story of two lives drifting apart.

Sheep farmers, however, did not usually emigrate to Hong Kong.

‘You portrayed yourself in a certain light,’ Leo told her evenly. ‘I took you at face value. You never once mentioned that you were married. You don’t wear a wedding ring. Believe it or not, my immediate conclusion wasn’t that you were a divorcee. Get where I’m going with this? If you can find the insult there, then please point it out.’

‘You think that this—’ she spread her arms wide to encompass everything inside the cottage and outside it ‘—is the sum total of my life? Is that why you figured that I was a safe bet to entice into bed with you—because I was so
backward
that I would be grateful and excited that a man like you, a man of the world, might condescend to show some interest in me? Interest of a passing nature, of course—because, as you’ve told me, you’re not into permanence. Not that I wouldn’t have guessed that.’

Leo recalled his ready expectations that the attraction between them would result in bed and had the grace to flush.

‘No one could accuse you of being backward,’ he muttered grimly.

Heather looked at him with fierce, angry eyes. It would have been helpful if she could have superimposed Brian’s face onto his, but no such luck. All she could see was his stupendous beauty, the lithe muscularity of his body. It made her more determined to have her say, to make sure that he knew in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t up for grabs. That way, he would avoid her as much as she was desperate for him to. She didn’t want to constantly feel fearful that she might just bump into him. She didn’t want to be tempted.

His expression was still and watchful. For a couple of seconds, her imagination took flight, and she wondered where they would be now if she had never said anything, if she had given in to that kiss completely and had let it take her to the step beyond. They would be upstairs in her king-sized bed. They would be naked and entwined, and she would be burning up with lust.

She closed her eyes briefly, feeling faint. She had to make a big effort to remind herself that a bit of pleasure would never be worth the loss of her self-esteem, which had taken such a long time to reconstruct.

‘How long have you been divorced?’

Heather opened her eyes and inhaled deeply. ‘A couple of years.’

‘What happened?’ Did this qualify as drama? Leo didn’t know. He just knew that he wanted her to finish whatever it was she had to say. If only, he told himself, so that he could walk away and thank his lucky stars for his near escape. A woman with baggage was never worth the hassle.

Besides, he still hadn’t found out what the sheep farmer was doing on the other side of the world.

‘What happened was that I married a guy who ended up making money his god.’

‘Not following you. What did you say he did?’

‘He was an investment banker. In the city. So, you see? I’m not quite the rustic country-bumpkin you thought I was.’

Like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces were now slotting together at mind-boggling speed. So that was why she had been so knowledgeable about financial matters; why she had been so wary and distrustful of him. Did she think that she could just stand there and make comparisons?

Leo didn’t know the guy, but he was outraged that he should be compared to anyone.

‘Investment banker. Hence your knowledge of the stock market.’

‘Oh yes,’ Heather said bitterly. ‘There was a time when I knew everything there was to know about what was happening in the world of high finance.’ Her eyes glazed over. She forgot that Leo was there. ‘You see, I thought that if I took an interest in what he did, I mean
really
took an interest, then he might be able to see that I was more than just the teenager who came from his home town. So I read up on all that stuff, even though it bored me to death.’

Leo, listening intently, could pick up on the hurt lying just below the surface, and he felt an irrational desire to find this character and knock him into kingdom come.

‘’Course, it didn’t work.’ Heather refocused on Leo. If he had tried interrupting her, asking questions, then she might have abbreviated everything, but his silence was the equivalent of a key unlocking a box. She hadn’t poured her heart out to anyone, and a part of her was stunned that she should choose to do so now with the most unlikely of candidates. But then it wasn’t as though she risked seeing him again. People bared their souls to their hairdressers, didn’t they? It was the same sort of thing, wasn’t it?

‘He was in less and less. How could I show off my knowledge of all things financial if he just wasn’t around?’

‘How old were you?’

‘Nineteen. Too young and too impressionable to see what was staring me in the face.’

‘He moved on,’ Leo said flatly, and she gave an imperceptible nod.

‘He was talented. A whizz kid. There was a whole list of “youngest ever” records which he’d broken, as he kept telling me. He had to work all hours, he also kept telling me, and fool that I was I accepted it. I busied myself with my art course and dashed back in the evenings to make meals that ended up in the bin most of the time.’ She glanced quickly at Leo but she couldn’t read what he was thinking. She had come so far with the sorry recital that there seemed little point in cutting it short now. And, besides, it was cathartic, spilling her guts.

‘I guess I knew it was all coming to an end, but I still hung on like an idiot until I got a call from an anonymous woman telling me that she was having an affair with my husband. She’d just been ditched in favour of a newer model, and I guess she decided that telling me was the best revenge she could have. ‘Course, I confronted Brian and, needless to say, he didn’t deny it. I think he was relieved, in a way.’

Watching her face was like watching a slideshow of emotions. He realised that he was clenching his fists and he slowly breathed out, unclenched them, and waited for her to continue.

‘You see, he was ashamed of me.’ Heather held her chin up and looked Leo squarely in the face. ‘Wrong clothes, wrong hair, not polished enough. The more money he earned, and the richer he became, the more his tastes changed. He no longer wanted small and plump and curly haired, he wanted leggy and blonde. Models. He was sorry, of course. And guilty too. He offered me as much money as I wanted, but all I took was enough to buy this cottage so that I could have a safe roof over my head while I kick-started my career back here. I didn’t know whether I’d find work or not, but it was a relief not to have to worry about meeting a mortgage while I looked. He got a transfer to Hong Kong, and good luck to him. As far as I’m concerned, he sold his soul to the Devil.’

‘And you’ve decided that I’m cut from the same cloth as a man who turned out to be an irresponsible philanderer.’

Put like that, Heather was uncomfortably aware that she might have been a bit liberal with her comparisons. But, when you looked at the bigger picture, weren’t they more or less the same—rich men who thought that they could buy whatever and whoever they wanted to? That their wealth entitled them to walk all over people without any regard to feelings? Leo and his ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ women were only a hop and a skip away from Brian and his ‘out with the old, in with the new’, weren’t they? Okay, so there might be some inconsistencies in the detail, but if you got bogged down in the detail, then you were lost.

She shrugged.

‘You were more than willing to use me,’ Heather began, but she faltered when she saw the thunderous, enraged expression on his face.

‘Use you?
Use you?
’

‘You think you can have whatever you want.’

‘You’re an adult. I’m an adult. As far as I’m concerned, sex between two consenting adults doesn’t involve exploitation of any kind, and believe me, I don’t need to coerce a woman into my bed. Your ex-husband may not have turned out to be the man you thought he was, but don’t even think of lumping me in the same category.’

‘You can’t deny that you’re cocooned by your wealth.’ Heather was angry that he was trying to trip her up, trying to use clever words to make her feel as though she had made a mistake about him. She hadn’t!

‘I don’t use it as an excuse to get women,’ he grated. ‘And that’s a despicable insinuation. Have I tried to buy you with gifts, in any way?’

‘No, but—’

‘But
what
? Are you going to eliminate every man from your life whose name begins with the letter B?’ he asked, his mouth twisting cynically. ‘Maybe it might just be safer to eliminate all men from your life. Then you can be guaranteed never to be hurt again.’ He stood up and noticed the way she cringed back, as though he posed some kind of physical threat to her. That was even more of a red rag as far as he was concerned.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said scathingly. ‘I won’t come near you.’

On his way to the door, Leo paused and turned to her. ‘An empty bed is a lonely place,’ he said coolly.

‘Better empty than littered with all the wrong kind of guys,’ Heather threw back at him. Her eyes were stinging. She knew that as soon as he left she was going to cry, because she could feel the tears pricking against her eyelids.