by Lee, Miranda
Leah didn’t like to think it was just his handsomeness that drew her. But maybe it was. Because she’d been right when she’d told him last night that she only knew him biblically.
What did she really know about him other than what she’d read in that paper, plus the little he’d told her?
A lot more, her love for him piped up. You know a lot more!
Jason was a man quickly liked and respected by his employees. A man who hated taking advantage of a vulnerable woman. A man who was honest about what he wanted and didn’t want.
And he was a man who’d once loved too much.
Leah had seen the pain in his eyes when he’d talked about his wife. She recognised that type of pain. She’d seen it in the mirror in her own eyes after her mother died. Then to a lesser degree, after Carl left her.
Loss could be a terrible thing when you cared. And Jason had cared.
Caring in a man was a good thing. It showed depth, and character.
Feeling better about loving him, Leah rose and tiptoed to the bathroom where she set about inspecting the damage in the vanity mirror.
There were faint fingerprint bruises on her hips and on her breasts. And one deeply purple love bite on her neck.
Leah touched it, surprised that it didn’t hurt too much, but infinitely grateful that she had long hair, which could cover the evidence of her night of wild sex.
Not that she would bother to cover any of the bruises whilst she was here, in Jason’s place. She rather liked the thought of his seeing what he’d done to her last night. Liked the thought of parading herself naked for him again today as well.
He’d insisted on her staying nude last night, not letting her cover up with a robe, forcing her to finally get over her squeamishness about her scars. After a while, she’d become quite shameless, and not at all self-conscious.
Pushing her hair back from her shoulders, she returned to the bedroom, and glanced back over at the bed.
Jason was still asleep.
The stainless steel digital clock on his glass-topped bedside table said it was ten past nine. Mrs B. was unlikely to have looked in her room as yet and discover she hadn’t come home the night before. She would presume Leah was sleeping in late after the dinner party.
Leah would ring her father this morning, but a little later on.
Leah still felt irritated with him for doing what he’d done last night, inviting Jason to dinner, then letting her think his mystery guest was some rich old codger. He really should not interfere in other people’s lives. He should be taught a lesson.
It would serve him right if she announced over the telephone this morning that she’d become Jason Pollack’s mistress. Which was virtually what she now was.
Some time during the night, Jason had asked her not to resign, and to move into the penthouse with him. She’d refused on both counts. To work with him every day and sleep with him every night would be courting disaster. She’d survived Carl leaving her. She would not survive Jason leaving her.
At the same time she could not resist him totally. So she told him he could stay the night at her place when he wanted to, and vice versa. But she would not wrap her life solely around him. She would find herself another job and keep her own place. Because she knew that one day—and this was the part she didn’t say to him—one day, he would grow tired of her as he had his previous girlfriend, and she would be cast adrift from his life.
The thought was horrible enough at it was. How much worse would the eventuality be if she worked and lived with the man, twenty-four seven?
Leah sighed, then wandered across to the wide, plate-glass window that faced east and was currently drenched in morning sunshine. She moved to press herself against the glass, soaking in its warmth, her arms lifting up in a languid stretch, flattening her breasts and tightening her belly.
It was a highly erotic stance. Not something she would ever have done before meeting Jason. But she revelled in it this morning, well aware that last night had changed her for ever. She was now a different creature. Much more sexually driven, her senses heightened, her desires expanded.
Common sense kept warning her against becoming too involved with a man who was never going to give what she now wanted: to be his wife and the mother of his children.
Common sense, however, didn’t feel like this. It didn’t send delicious shivers down her spine. Or make her body yearn and burn in a thousand exciting ways.
Neither did common sense ever make her forget, even for a moment, that she was basically still alone. During Jason’s lovemaking she could pretend that everything was all right.
Even though it wasn’t…
‘My God, you’re her!’
Leah whirled to the sound of Jason’s voice, blinking madly to rid herself of the tears that had welled up in her eyes.
Jason was sitting up in bed, his expression both startled and excited. The black sheet was still over his lower half, for which she was grateful.
‘Her who?’ she asked, walking quickly back towards the bed. Some embarrassment had resurfaced at being discovered standing there like that.
‘The girl in my dream.’
‘What girl in what dream?’ she asked as she dived under the sheet and pulled it up over her breasts.
‘The dream I had just before I bought Beville Holdings. About this girl on a billboard advertising their shampoo. She was photographed from the rear, naked, with lovely long fair streaming down her bare back. She looked exactly like you looked a second ago…’
When he reached over to run his hands down her long fall of hair, his amazed expression abruptly changed to a frown. ‘Good Lord, look at the state of your neck! Did I do that?’
‘Do you see anyone else in this bed with me?’
‘Why didn’t you stop me?’
Leah laughed. ‘Why don’t I turn back the tides as well?’
‘I can’t believe I did that,’ he murmured, his eyes back to amazed, his fingertips tracing the love bite.
‘There’s a few marks on my breasts and hips as well. But nothing quite like this one.’
‘Will makeup hide them?’ he asked unexpectedly.
‘Possibly. But I’m not exactly going to walk round naked, except when I’m with you.’
‘That depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘On whether I can talk you into becoming the face of Beville Holdings products.’
‘What?’ ‘I’ve outlined a new advertising campaign based on that dream I had. I spoke to Harry about it yesterday and he said that its success would depend on my getting the right model.’
‘Harry who?’
‘Harry Wilde. He’s an advertising genius and a friend of mine.’
‘But I’m no model, Jason.’
‘You’re more beautiful than most.’
‘But…but what about my scars?’
‘No one will see them. I promise.’
‘The photographer will.’
‘You don’t have to be really naked. You just have to look like you’re naked from the back from the hips up. You can wear a low-slung sarong. And stick things over your breasts.’
‘I don’t know, Jason…’
‘You’d be perfect, Leah. And you’d enjoy it.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘The pay would be good as well. Better than your current salary.’
‘I don’t really need my salary, Jason. I have this trust fund from my mother and—’
‘Leah, you like earning your own money,’ he broke in. ‘Otherwise, why did you go and get a job in the first place?’
‘I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.’
‘Which you have done. And I applaud you for it. Now give yourself a new challenge and do this.’
‘You’re very persuasive, aren’t you?’
‘That’s what I’ve been trained to be.’
‘You’re far too used to getting your own way.’
‘I haven’t with you. You won’t even move in
with me.’
‘You’ll survive.’
‘You loved him a lot, didn’t you?’
The question threw Leah for a second. ‘You don’t usually marry someone you don’t love,’ came her careful reply.
‘True.’
‘This conversation has turned far too serious for me,’ Leah said. ‘I’m going to have a shower, then go into that dental-white kitchen of yours and make breakfast.’
‘You don’t like this place much, do you?’ he said before she could escape the bed. ‘Go on. Tell me the truth.’
‘The truth? Okay. I think it’s the coldest, most soulless apartment I’ve ever been in.’
He laughed a delighted laugh. ‘I do, too.’
‘Then why did you buy it?’
‘Because it was convenient and a good investment. And because it matched its owner at the time,’ he added, but without that haunted look she’d seen in his face before.
‘Decisions made after someone dies are never good ones,’ she told him. ‘My father was going to sell the family home after Mum died. I dare say he might have bought something like this. He’s all for good investments. I fought him tooth and nail and he didn’t sell in the end. But I’m still a bit worried. It’s not a good sign that he wants to sell the boat he named after Mum.’
‘I could buy the boat for you, if you like.’
Leah glowered at him. ‘You are not to buy me anything, Jason Pollack. Nothing expensive, anyway. Flowers and chocolates are fine. But no boats, or diamonds, or any of the other telltale gifts that rich men buy their beck-and-call girls.’
‘You’re not my beck-and-call girl,’ he growled, pulling her over on top of him.
‘Though I’d like you to be.’
‘Would you just?’
‘Damn right, I would,’ he muttered, pushing her up into a sitting position, her knees on either side of his hips.
‘I said I was going to have a shower,’ she told him, trying not to give in to the urges he spurred in her. ‘I have to ring home as well. As much as I’m still peeved with my father, I don’t want to worry him.’
‘Afterwards.’
‘I…I’m not really in the mood for more sex right now, Jason.’
‘Liar. I can see that you’re lying. You can watch me come, if you’d prefer.’
Leah’s head spun with his words. The idea excited her. She’d never done that.
She’d always been too caught up in the act herself. How would it feel to remain fully in control whilst he lost it?
Taking a deeply gathering breath, Leah lifted herself up on to her knees, then reached down to take him in her hand, rubbing him till a tortured moan slipped from his mouth. Finally, she put him just inside her, then sank slowly downwards.
‘You do realise,’ she said when their bodies were together, ‘that I’m not the only girl at Beville Holdings sleeping with her boss.’
Conversation, Leah hoped, would distract her from her own rapidly escalating excitement. Maybe she’d be able stay more detached if she chatted away to him.
‘Hell, Leah, I’m not interested in talking about Trish and Jim right now.’
‘I wasn’t talking about Trish and Jim. I meant Shelley and Jim.’
His eyebrows lifted. ‘So what else do you know that I don’t know?’
‘Management have wasted a lot of money lately.’
‘You think I should sack the lot?’
‘I think you should offer them incentives to leave.’
He smiled. ‘You’d make me a good Girl Friday, you know. Say the word and I’ll promote you.’
‘I think you should settle for me being the face of Beville Holdings. I don’t like the idea of sleeping with the boss.’
‘I’ll still be your boss.’
‘No, you won’t. As of next week, I’m signing myself up with a proper modelling agency. You’ll have go through them if you want me.’
‘I want you,’ he said, his dark eyes gleaming as he grabbed her hips and began moving her up and down.
Yes, he did, Leah conceded with a rush of hot blood through her body. For now.
But not forever.
‘Lean forward,’ he ordered her. ‘Stretch your arms up over my head.’
‘No. I’m supposed to be staying all cool while I just watch you.’
‘Just do it, Leah.’
She did it, the position setting her breasts swinging towards his face, and his mouth. He licked the aching tips, then took one between his teeth.
The pain was delicious, but swiftly unbearable. She wrenched her breast out of his mouth, and straightened.
‘You have to stop doing things like that,’ she told him breathlessly.
‘Why?’
‘Because I might get to like it.’
‘I hope so.’
‘You have a wicked side to you, Jason Pollack.’
He laughed. ‘And don’t you just love it.’
She blushed. Not her first blush since she’d climbed into that taxi with him last night.
‘And I love that about you, too,’ he murmured, reaching up to stroke her pink cheeks before running his fingertips down over her breasts, down her taut belly into the damp golden curls that surrounded her sex. ‘You haven’t been like this with any other man, not even your precious Carl. Have you?’ he demanded as he touched her there, where her nerve endings were gathered into an apex of exquisite sensitively.
‘No,’ she confessed shakily.
‘Only with me,’ he rasped. ‘You are my beck-and-call girl, Leah. Make no mistake about that. But only because you want to be,’ he said as his hand withdrew to take hold of her hips once more. ‘You do want to be, don’t you?’ he said as he urged her on.
She didn’t answer him. Just closed her eyes…
Chapter 14
Joachim bloom had just finished breakfast when the phone rang. He guessed who it was before he answered it.
‘It’s me, Daddy,’ Leah said with a touch of defiance in her voice.
‘So I see,’ he replied calmly. ‘Am I to presume you stayed the night at Pollack’s place?’
‘Jason, Daddy. Call him Jason. And, yes, that’s where I stayed. Did…er…Mrs B.
say anything this morning when I didn’t make it down for breakfast?’
‘No. I told her you went out to a nightclub with a gentlemen friend late last night and wouldn’t be back till later today.’
‘That was presumptuous of you. What did she say?’
‘I’m not quite sure. She mumbles a bit, does Mrs B. But it sounded something like, it’s about time.’
‘Oh…’
Joachim smiled. ‘You sound piqued that we’re not all shocked out of our skins, Leah.’
‘I’m not shocked you’re not shocked. After all, you threw us together on purpose, didn’t you? Though Lord knows why. That’s what I’d like to know, Daddy.
Why pick a man for me like Jason Pollack?’
Joachim knew it would sound ridiculous if he said, ‘Your mother suggested him to me.’
‘I liked the look of him in the paper,’ he said instead. ‘I like self-made men.’
‘You implied to me that he’d married his first wife for his money.’
‘Did I? I don’t recall doing that. Maybe that was you, jumping to that conclusion. So, what do you think now that you know him better? Did he marry his first wife for her money?’
‘No. He married her because he loved her. So much so that he never wants to fall in love again, or get married again.’
Joachim’s dismay was sharp. It seemed he’d made a big mistake here.
Serve him right for listening to so-called messages from the afterlife. He’d never believed in the supernatural before. He suddenly felt very foolish for following that voice in his head. Of course it hadn’t been Isabel talking to him, he reprimanded himself sternly. How could he ever have imagined it?
‘I’m sorry, Leah. Are you very angry with me?’
‘Not angry, Daddy. Just a bit annoyed. You r
eally should learn to butt out of other people’s lives. If and when I want another husband, I will find him. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Meanwhile, Jason and I do like each other. A lot. So don’t be shocked if the tabloids start calling us an item. I suspect we’re going to be seen out and about a bit together in the coming weeks. Oh, and another thing. I’m resigning my job at Beville Holdings on Monday and becoming a model.’
‘A model! But…but…’
‘Yes, I know. My scars. Obviously, I won’t be becoming a swimwear model. But not to worry. I have my first contract in the bag. I’m to be the face of Beville Holdings products in a new advertising campaign they’re launching in a few months.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Not at all. There has to some benefit to being the boss’s mistress.’
‘Mistress!’
‘Mistress. Girlfriend. Whatever.’
Joachim finally heard it in his daughter’s voice. The underlying pain. There could only be one reason for it. She’d fallen in love with Jason Pollack.
For a split second, Joachim felt devastated. Till that damned voice piped up in his head again, whispering that everything would be all right.
Against all logic, relief flooded his soul.
Have faith, my darling, the voice whispered to him.
It was Isabel’s voice. He recognised it.
Joachim had to clear his throat to speak. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Jason’s a good man.’
‘Daddy, have you been drinking?’
‘Only coffee.’
‘He just wants me for the sex. You do realise that, don’t you?’
‘Lots of relationships begin with just sex, daughter,’ Joachim pointed out reasonably.
‘He’s still in love with his wife!’
‘Possibly, he is. Love doesn’t die just because of death. But she is dead, Leah, and you’re very much alive. So is Jason.’
‘Jason knows what he wants and doesn’t want, Daddy. He’s been very honest with me. Right from the start.’
‘And when was the start, daughter?’
Leah sighed a weary sounding sigh. ‘Friday night. After work.’
‘I see.’ Joachim didn’t really see.
Have faith, Joachim.
