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Around seven that same morning, Grace emerged from the shower, wrapped a fleecy towel round her nakedness and wondered ruefully where her cases were. Their frantic charge to the bedroom the night before had left no time for such niceties as unpacking. Her face burned and she glanced in one of the many mirrors, angry and ashamed of herself because she was still acting out of character and letting her life go off the rails. One mistake did not need to lead to another, so why had she slept with Leo again last night? Waking up in bed alone in the silent apartment with her brain awash with unfamiliar thoughts of self-loathing had unnerved her. Leo, she had decided miserably, Leo was bad for her.
She crept out to the hall where her luggage still awaited her and she was about to lift a case when she heard a sound from another room and stiffened uncertainly.
‘Grace...is that you?’
It was too late to retreat with any dignity but the discovery that Leo was still in the apartment and had not yet gone off to work as she had dimly assumed was unwelcome. She moved to the doorway of a large ultra-modern room flooded with light from a wall of windows and saw Leo. Her breath hitched in her throat. Barefoot, clad in only a pair of jeans unfastened at the waist and an unbuttoned shirt, Leo looked heartbreakingly gorgeous with his messy black hair, stubbled jawline and stunningly unreadable dark eyes gleaming in the sunlight.
‘I thought you were out,’ she confided. ‘I need to get dressed.’
‘No hurry... Housekeeping doesn’t get here until nine.’ Leo stared at her, his eyes eating her alive in the pounding silence. With her red hair rippling damply round her narrow shoulders, her triangular face warm with colour and her sea-glass eyes bright and evasive, she reminded him of a pixie. She was tiny and her curves were gloriously feminine. He wanted to tell her to drop the towel. The swelling at his groin was more than willing to bridge an awkward moment with sex.
‘I have things to do.’
‘Come here...I want to show you some properties,’ Leo urged.
Grace moved reluctantly forward, one hand clutching the towel to her breasts lest it slip. She was wasting her time with the modesty, Leo thought helplessly. It only made him want to rip it off her more. ‘Properties?’ she questioned, dry-mouthed.
Leo sank down on the sofa he had abandoned and swung out the laptop he had been using. ‘I’ve been looking for somewhere suitable for you to live.’
‘But I’m here...er...I thought...’
‘This is a company apartment, used by my father and my brother as well. It’s serviced, convenient for me,’ Leo explained. ‘Until now I haven’t spent enough time in London to warrant the purchase of separate accommodation.’
‘And that’s changing?’ Grace took a seat uneasily by his side and the faint but awesomely familiar scent of him assailed her nostrils, an intoxicating hint of sandalwood and citrus fruit with a foundation note of warm, musky masculinity. Below the towel her breasts beaded into straining points and warmth pooled in her pelvis.
‘Obviously it will. If my child’s going to be here, I will be too,’ Leo countered carelessly, as if that truth was so obvious he shouldn’t have to say it out loud. ‘But fortunately I do own quite a few investment properties here and I’ve made up a small selection of the ones that are currently available for you.’
Grace was frowning in bewilderment. ‘For...me?’
‘You’re homeless. My most basic responsibility should be ensuring that you have a comfortable and secure base.’
‘I wasn’t homeless until you persuaded me to move out of Matt’s spare room,’ Grace said shortly, disliking the label as much as his take-charge attitude that suggested she was a problem to be tackled and solved. ‘And I assumed I was staying here.’
‘You need your own space.’
No, Leo wanted his space back, Grace suspected. Just then she recalled that he hadn’t still been in bed with her the morning after their first night together on the yacht either. ‘You should’ve left me where I was.’
‘I’m not going to argue about this with you. It’s futile,’ Leo spelt out, flipping up the first of three luxury properties, chosen for proximity to her university campus.
