LITMIR.BIZ

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why he had been unable to stop himself from responding to her, unable to control his desire.

      Yes, he had felt that bittersweet pang of attraction when he had first seen her in the hotel foyer, but knowing what she was ought surely to have destroyed that completely.

      He tensed as he saw the bedroom door opening.

      At first, intent on making her escape, Jodi didn’t see him standing motionlessly in front of the window.

      It was light now, the clear, fresh light of an early summer morning, and when she did realise that he was there her face flushed as sweetly pink as the sun-warmed feathers of clouds in the sky beyond the window.

      Leo heard her involuntary gasp and saw the quick, despairing glance she gave the main door, her only exit from the suite. Anticipating her actions, he moved towards the door, reaching it before her and standing in front of it, blocking her escape.

      As she saw him properly Jodi felt the embarrassed heat possessing her body deepen to a burning, soul-scorching intensity. It was him, the man she had seen in the foyer, the man she had thought so very attractive, the man who had made her have the most extraordinarily uncharacteristic thoughts!

      Out of the corner of her eye Jodi could see the coffee-table and the telltale cocktail jug.

      ‘Yes,’ Leo agreed urbanely. ‘Not only have you illegally entered my suite, but you also had the gall to run up a room-service bill. Do you intend to pay personally for the use of my bed and the bar, or would you prefer me to send the bills to Jeremy Driscoll?’

      Jodi, who had been staring in mute distress at the cocktail jug, turned her head automatically to look at him as she heard the familiar name of her least favourite fellow villager.

      ‘Jeremy?’ she questioned uncertainly.

      Jeremy Driscoll’s father-in-law might own the local factory, and Jeremy himself might run it, but that did not make him well-liked in the locale. He had a reputation for underhand behaviour, and for attempting to bring in certain cost-cutting and potentially dangerous practices, which thankfully had been blocked by the workers’ union and the health and safety authority.

      But what he had to do with her present humiliating situation Jodi had no idea at all.

      ‘Yes. Jeremy,’ Leo confirmed, unkindly imitating the anxious tremor in her voice. ‘I know exactly what’s going on,’ he continued acidly. ‘And why you’re here. But if you think for one minute that I’m going to allow myself to be blackmailed into giving in…’

      Jodi swallowed uncomfortably against the tight ball of self-recrimination and shame that was lodged in her throat.

      Did Leo Jefferson—it had to be him—really think that she was the kind of person who would behave in such a way? His use of the word ‘blackmail’ had particularly shocked her. But was the truth any easier for her to bear, never mind admit to someone else? Was it really any more palatable to have to say that she had been so drunk—albeit by accident—that she simply had not known what she was doing?

      To have gone to bed with a complete stranger, to have done the things she had done with him, and, even worse, wanted the things she had wanted with him…A woman in her position, responsible for the shaping and guiding of young minds…

      Jodi shuddered to think of how some of the parents of her pupils, not to mention the school’s board of governors, might view her behaviour.

      ‘Well, you can go back to your paymaster,’ Leo Jefferson was telling her with cold venom, ‘and you can tell him, whilst you might have given me good value for his money, it makes not one jot of difference to my plans. I still have no intention of cancelling the contract and allowing him to buy back the business.

      ‘I have no idea what he hoped to achieve by paying you to have sex with me,’ Leo continued grimly and untruthfully. ‘But all he gave me was a night of passably good if somewhat over-professionalised sex. If he thinks he can use that against me in some way…’ Leo shrugged to underline his indifference whilst discreetly watching Jodi to see how she was reacting to his fabricated insouciance.

      She had gone very pale, and there was a look in her eyes that under other circumstances Leo might almost have described as haunted.

      Jodi fought to control her spiralling confusion and to make sense out of what Leo Jefferson was saying. She was going to avoid thinking about his cruelly insulting personal comments right now. They were the kind of thing she could only allow herself to examine in private. But his references to Jeremy Driscoll and her own supposed connection with him were totally baffling.

      She opened her mouth to say as much, but before she could do so Leo was exclaiming tersely, ‘I don’t know who you are or why you can’t find a less self-destructive way of earning a living.’

      Ignoring the latter part of his comment, Jodi pounced with shaky relief on his ‘I don’t know who you are’.

      If he didn’t know who she was, she certainly wasn’t going to enlighten him. With any luck she might, please fate, be able to salvage her pride and her public reputation with a damage-limitation exercise that meant no one other than the two of them need ever know what had happened.

      She had abandoned any thought of pursuing her real purpose in seeking him out. How on earth could she plead with him for her school’s future now? Another burden of sickening guilt joined the one already oppressing her. She had not just let herself down, and her standards, she had let the school and her pupils down as well. And she still couldn’t fully understand how it had all happened. Yes, she had had too much to drink, but surely that alone…

      Cringing, she reflected on her reaction to Leo Jefferson when she had seen him walking across the hotel foyer the previous evening. Then, of course, she had not known who he was. Only that…only that she found him attractive…

      She felt numbed by the sheer unacceptability of what she had done, shamed and filled with the bleakest sense of disbelief and despair.

      

      Her lack of any response and her continued silence were just a ploy she was using as a form of gamesmanship, Leo decided as he watched her, and as for that anguished shock he had seen earlier in her eyes, well, as he had good cause to know, she was an extremely accomplished performer!

      ‘I have to go. Please let me past.’

      The soft huskiness of her voice reminded Leo of the way she had moaned her desire to him during the night. What the hell was the matter with him? He couldn’t possibly still want her!

      Even though he had made no move to stand away from the door, Jodi walked towards it as determinedly as she could. She had, she reminded herself, faced a whole roomful of disruptive teenage pupils of both sexes during her teacher training without betraying her inner fear. Surely she could outface one mere man? Only somehow the use of the word ‘mere’ in connection with this particular man brought a mirthless bubble of painful laughter to her throat.

      This man could never be a ‘mere’ anything. This man…

      She had guts, Leo acknowledged as she stared calmly past him, but then no doubt her chosen profession would mean that she was no stranger to the art of making a judicial exit.

      It went against everything he believed in to forcibly constrain her, even though he was loath to let her go without reinforcing just what he thought of her and the man who was paying her.

      Another second and she would have been so close to him that they would almost have been body to body, Jodi recognised on a mute shudder of distress as Leo finally allowed her access to the door. Expelling a shaky, pent-up breath of relief, she reached for the handle.

      Leo waited until she had turned it before reminding her grimly, ‘Driscoll might think this was a clever move, but you can tell him from me that it wasn’t. Oh, and just a word of warning for you personally: any attempt to publicise what happened between us last night and I can promise you that any ridicule I suffer you will suffer ten times more.’

      Jodi didn’t speak.

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