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She swallowed, forcing herself to focus on the passing landscape beyond the windows of the train. All around her the wide English countryside spread to the horizon. Fields and hedges and woods and little houses, all flashing past. She was going home. She was going back to her grandmother and that was her reality. Only that.
A man who could melt her with a single glance of his dark, dark eyes was nothing to do with her.
Nothing.
She went on staring sightlessly.
Inside her, a little pool of bleakness formed.
CHAPTER FIVE
LEON sat back impassively in the large leather chair in his London office. Alistair Lassiter was talking at him. He’d been talking at him for the last twenty minutes, and Leon had stopped listening after the first ten. He’d heard all he needed to know. The man was getting desperate. That much was screamingly obvious. Leon had been well aware of the financial precariousness of the Lassiter organisation, but now—whether he realised it or not, and Leon suspected he didn’t—Alistair Lassiter had shown him that there were no white knights in the offing to save his sorry, extravagant skin.
All that was left for Leon to decide was whether he would do so.
But that wasn’t what was currently occupying his mind.
It wasn’t Alistair Lassiter’s business affairs that were preoccupying him. It was his daughter. Thoughts about her were going round and round in succession.
Talk about conflicted …
After their final barbed exchange at the charity function, with Flavia Lassiter doing her damnedest to make him think her rude and stuck up to the point where he was almost ready to wash his hands of her, he’d then completely reversed his decision while taking her home! She’d only had to look at him the way she had, so close to him in the dim, closeted privacy of the car. When she’d met his gaze full-on, drowning in his eyes, every reservation about her had been submerged in an overwhelming desire to do just what he had—sweep her into his arms and kiss her….
And it had been a disaster! Oh, not the kiss—that had been a sensual white-out!—but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
I rushed her.
That was the accusation that was staring him in the face. He’d rushed her—and panicked her. And she’d bolted.
It was too much, too soon. She couldn’t handle it, couldn’t accept it—not so suddenly.
Her rudeness to him he could now see was obviously her attempt to fight their attraction to each other, which she just couldn’t cope with—at least not yet. Hence her precipitate reaction to him when he’d kissed her. Self-accusation stabbed again. He’d indulged his own desires at her expense, and the result had been she’d bolted.
He took a steadying breath—OK, so he’d mishandled the situation, acted like an impulsive teenager instead of an experienced man who should have read the situation more adroitly, but that kiss had been proof to both of them of just how powerfully attracted they were to each other. She would find that kiss as impossible to forget as he did.
Resolution replaced his berating of himself. All he had to do now was consider the best way of taking the situation forward to the conclusion that was, he knew with every atom in his body, as inevitable as day following night. All he had to do was find the right way to woo her.
Leon’s eyes refocussed on Lassiter, glinting in impatience—he would far rather be focussing on Lassiter’s daughter, undoing the damage his kiss had done, not listening to her father extol the wonderful ‘investment opportunity’ of saving his company. A frown creased Leon’s brow minutely. How would Flavia react if he decided not to bail out her father? Would she still want anything to do with him? A disquieting memory of their conversation last night about how she seemed content to accept her father’s financial support wormed its way into her head. Impatiently, he thrust it aside. To many women of her background acting as a social hostess was occupation enough. It was the way they’d been brought up.
What will she do if her father goes under?
The question hovered in his head, uncomfortable and troubling.
With sudden decision he shifted in his seat and flexed his shoulders. He wasn’t prepared to take the risk that Flavia Lassiter would want to have anything more to do with him at all if she knew he’d chosen to let her father go down the drain. So he’d bail out Lassiter—but on his own terms.
He held up a hand, interrupting Alistair Lassiter’s self-justifying peroration.
‘You’ve made your case. I’m interested. But there are conditions. I’ll want equity, executive control, and my own finance man in place to authorise future spending. And you’ll have to pull out of some of your African deals—the ones in Luranda—I don’t do business with dictators, however much they lavish their country’s foreign aid revenues and natural resources on me.’
Lassiter’s face reddened. ‘Equity? I was looking more at lines of credit—’
Leon shook his head. ‘I always insist on equity,’ he spelt out.
Lassiter promptly took another tack instead. ‘You can’t be serious about pulling out of Luranda? The profit margins are massive!’
‘At the expense of the country’s benighted people,’ Leon retorted.
‘Lurandans are notoriously lazy and feckless—like all too many in the Third World,’ Lassiter blustered.
