CHAPTER NINE

      ‘DON’T YOU EVER, for as long as you live, address me like that again!’ Leo launched at Letty in a furious undertone as he tugged her up the spiral staircase in the corner and flung open a door into an office, already occupied by an older man.

      ‘Sorry, Dmitri… I need a private space,’ said Leo, and the other man quickly vacated the room to leave them alone.

      ‘I am fed up with your ex-girlfriends swarming like piranha fish around us!’ Letty sliced back at Leo. ‘They’re everywhere we go, demanding your attention!’

      Leo regarded her, his anger mysteriously ebbing from his bright golden gaze. ‘You’re a jealous, possessive woman, yineka mou,’ he declared, utterly disconcerting Letty as she squared up to him with angrily clenched fists. ‘And that is remarkable behaviour from a woman who told me to embrace my sexual freedom and kicked me out of bed!’

      ‘I did not kick you out of bed!’ Letty fired back at him, still trying to work out when she had lost the plot to the extent that she had blamed Leo for Dido’s rudeness and persistence and had literally snarled at him. Her cheeks went red. ‘But I am not jealous either.’

      Leo stalked forward, crowding her back against the desk. ‘You were jealous,’ he persisted with the most curious edge of satisfaction stamped on his lean, darkly handsome features. ‘So, how are you planning to handle me being with these other women you want me to sleep with?’

      ‘Like a trooper!’ Letty threw back at him. ‘It wouldn’t mean anything to me. I’m tough.’

      ‘You may be tough,’ conceded Leo, framing her hectically flushed face with two big hands. ‘But you are a lousy liar! You want me and you don’t want to share me. I wouldn’t want to share you either because you’re mine—’

      ‘Oh, take a hike with the property claim!’ Letty advised with acid bite. ‘I don’t belong to you in any way!’

      ‘Let me show you then,’ Leo growled, rough and low, crushing her mouth under his with such insistence that her knees went weak, all the fiery intensity that was Leo powering his passionate assault on her tender mouth.

      With the unfamiliar knowledge that her temper was out of control, Letty’s mind was a whirling turmoil of contrasting reactions. She wanted to slap him but she wanted to kiss him back too, and the liquid heat pooling in her pelvis wouldn’t let her push him away. Instead she traded kiss for kiss, hard and fierce and so necessary to her in her current mood that she could not have restrained that desperate need hurtling up through her.

      And suddenly Leo was settling her down on the desk, long fingers smoothing up her inner thighs to yank with force at her knickers. And Letty was shocked but not outraged, hunger for him driving her, ensuring that she too unconditionally craved the drivingly urgent invasion of his body into hers. She yanked at his tousled black hair as he endeavoured to don protection while she ran her greedy hands below his shirt, over the smooth flexing muscles shifting below her every caress.

      ‘You’re driving me insane!’ Leo rasped in a tone of raw arousal, his eyes blazing like polished gold ingots set between sweeping black lashes.

      He sank into the slick wet welcome of her body with an uninhibited groan of appreciation. The desk creaked under that very physical onslaught. Her body jolted, hot sweet delight laced with savage excitement making her heart hammer and her blood race. With every sinuous twist of his lithe hips he hammered the exact spot inside her that maximised her pleasure. The pressure inside her built and built until it surged up through her in a wild white-knuckle climax that made her cry out his name.

      ‘Would this be the right or the wrong moment to say thank you for sharing your birthday with me?’ Leo murmured huskily above her head, still panting to catch his breath from his exertions.

      As Leo righted his clothing, Letty leapt off the desk like a scalded cat and discovered her legs were too wobbly to hold her upright. ‘It was the champagne,’ she muttered between clenched teeth.

      ‘One glass? Even you are not that much of a lightweight. No, finally accept that we have crazy good chemistry together,’ Leo asserted without remorse.

      And why was she looking for remorse from him? she asked herself fiercely. Of course he had no regrets, having just comprehensively proved that he could break down her barriers and persuade her to do what she had sworn not to do. A guilty sense of having failed her own standards afflicted Letty.

      ‘So good it’s off the charts,’ Leo grated, hauling her into his arms, striving to hang onto the advantage he had gained. ‘The sex ban isn’t going to work for us.’

      Letty froze as he brushed her tumbled hair back from her woodenly self-contained face to look down at her. ‘It has to work,’ she parried with an edge of desperation because she didn’t know who she was any more, what she was trying to do, why she had let herself down to such an extent, and then she gazed up into Leo’s stunning eyes and reeled at the beauty of them set in that lean strong face of his.

      In that instant, the stark realisation that in the matter of a few short weeks she had become deeply attached to Leo shattered her. She loved him. Of course she found it a challenge to step back and deny what her own mind and body longed to have, that intimate connection which might have been essentially meaningless to a male of Leo’s experience and habits, but which meant a great deal more to her. No longer could she deny or wilfully misunderstand the powerful feelings he inspired in her. Earlier, he had been right, and she had been wrong. She was jealous of his tribe of exes and admirers. She didn’t like seeing him with another woman, didn’t like watching another woman command his attention. How petty was that?

      Yet being with Leo made her feel stronger, more confident, more individual in more ways than she had words to describe. That was the positive side to loving him while she mentally shook her head over the foolishness that accompanied those same feelings. She had lost her temper over pushy Dido, had been intolerant and idiotically possessive. So, he was right and she was wrong. If this was how she truly felt, how could she ever contrive to live with the knowledge that Leo was having sex with other women? Suddenly she felt as though she had backed herself into a corner and she didn’t know how to get out of it again.

      ‘Compromise is not the end of the world,’ Leo murmured huskily, pressing an abstracted kiss against her furrowed brow, uncomfortably aware that that clever brain of hers was turning like a clock and probably not in his favour. ‘Eventually we’ll understand what works best for us. It’s too soon to make major decisions about our direction right now.’

      Letty gritted her teeth. She was too proud to appreciate Leo being generous enough to offer her a face-saving excuse. ‘We’ll see,’ she muttered flatly. ‘We should return to our table.’

      Leo fished a comb out of his jacket and tidied her hair and suggested she fix her lipstick. She had never felt as ashamed of herself as she did at that moment when she registered that her inexperience in relationships had sent her rushing down the wrong path. It was an effort to return to the crowds downstairs and smile and chat as though nothing whatsoever had happened while her body still hummed and pulsed from Leo’s rawly masculine possession. He had won his point but he wasn’t crowing in triumph and she supposed