Free Hired for the Boss's Bedroom by Cathy Williams Page B

view, but she couldn’t curb her desire to hear his. She hated her curiosity, but it was like an itch that needed to be scratched. She was desperate to get her anger to boiling point, because she would really have liked to despise him, but little pieces of him that didn’t fit in with the stereotype kept sabotaging all her efforts, and her body was betraying her mind and ambushing her good intentions.
    ‘I make it clear from the outset that a wedding ring isn’t part of the agenda. If some of them have nursed any hopes in that direction, then they haven’t said. I don’t go out with women who throw hissy fits if they think they’ve been let down, and I don’t go out with women who think that marriage is the inevitable conclusion to a relationship. Does that answer your question?’
    ‘So all’s fair in love and war?’
    ‘Get to the point, Heather.’ The tepid coffee was now stone cold. Leo pushed it aside and looked at her. Having dived into the water, he was only now realising that there were icebergs under the surface. He’d never had to put this amount of effort into a woman before, he thought ill-temperedly.
    ‘The point is…’ There was a jumble of words in her head and she was temporarily silenced as she tried to sift through them, find the words that were important and discard the ones that weren’t.
    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