The Party Starts at Midnight

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_669fa82b-6c26-5009-a360-108c41c91df6)

FOR WHAT FELT like the longest time Abby didn’t say anything. Didn’t do anything. She couldn’t. She was speechless. Stunned into immobility.

So much for explaining why she was really here, as she’d been about to. And so much for thinking that she was muddling through what was a hideously awkward situation reasonably all right.

That assumption had been well and truly shot out of the water because had he really just said what she thought he’d said? Implied what she thought he’d implied? Did he really think that she’d been sent to seduce him? In a professional capacity? Supplied by his brother?

Her mind was blank with shock and she was reeling all over again because OK, so he didn’t know who she was—the meetings she’d had had always been with Jake, who was the face of the company while Leo very firmly remained in the background, and from what she understood he’d been away a lot of the time anyway—but seriously? Didn’t he recognise her name? Hadn’t he received any of her emails? And was this really the way his supposedly razor-sharp brain worked?

With her jaw about to hit the floor, Abby quite forgot the purpose of the hand-to-eye combo, which wasn’t just to protect his modesty but also to stop her from ogling his body, lowered her hand and stared at him.

And immediately wished she hadn’t because prone and passed out he’d been impressive, but sitting upright, radiating energy, tension, and well, sheer presence, he practically robbed her of breath, never mind speech.

Not that he was exactly waiting for an answer even if she had been able to provide one. No. Now, to add insult to injury, he appeared to be checking her out, looking her over, slowly, lazily and thoroughly, his gaze sliding from her eyes to her mouth to her breasts and lower, lingering over every available inch of her.

And dammit if her body didn’t begin to respond to his scrutiny. To her appal, she could feel it happening. The heat pooling in her stomach. The tingles prickling her skin. The tension winding through her muscles and the beginnings of desire, intoxicating and heady and so inappropriate on so many levels she didn’t know who she was more disgusted with, herself or him.

‘Well?’ he asked, finally raising dark, inscrutable eyes to hers and arching an eyebrow.

‘I’m none of the above,’ she said tartly, silently adding you obnoxious jerk and feeling her estimation of him—which had previously been pretty high given everything he and his brother had achieved—plummet through every one of the thirty floors that lay between them and solid ground.

‘No?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Well, whatever you are,’ he said flatly, ‘you’ve had a wasted journey because I’m not interested.’

And, wham, there was another insult.

Abby swallowed back a gasp and tried not to recoil at the bolt of—what was that? Disappointment? Couldn’t be. Hurt? No way. Outrage? Definitely. That was what it was. She was outraged. Offended. Incensed.

And she’d had enough. Certainly of being on the floor and having him looking down on her with such dry disdain, such ice-cold superiority when he was so totally, so unbelievably in the wrong.

Setting her jaw and trying to formulate a response that wouldn’t cost her her job, she grabbed her clipboard and, holding it to her middle like some sort of a shield, stood up.

‘Actually,’ she said, fixing a cool smile to her face and just about keeping a lid on the urge to tell him exactly what she thought of him because however much of a jerk he was he was still a client, and an influential one at that, ‘I am here in a professional capacity, just not the one you’re thinking of.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m an event organiser,’ she said, then added pointedly, ‘Your event organiser. And you’re paying me a lot for the privilege, so there’s absolutely nothing “gifty” about it at all.’

There followed a couple of seconds of silence as presumably this sank into his seriously warped brain and then something that she hoped might be mortification flickered across his face.

‘My event organiser,’ he echoed with a faint frown, as if it was taking considerable effort to assimilate the information, which maybe it was because his head was clearly a mess. But, ooh, she didn’t like the way he emphasised the ‘my’, whether he’d meant it that way or not.

‘Yours and Jake’s,’ she clarified, then added in a tone so chilly it could have frozen the Sahara, ‘And just in case we’re still not clear, the event I’ve organised for this evening is your Christmas-slash-ten-year-anniversary party taking place right now downstairs. The party you’re meant to be at. Thanking your staff for all their hard work this year, celebrating your success, and generally being around looking full of festive cheer.’ Instead of being upstairs, unconscious as the result of a drinking spree and then flinging potentially slanderous allegations about the place.

His jaw tightened, his dark eyes narrowed and she thought that she’d never seen anyone less full of festive cheer, but that wasn’t her problem.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Seven.’

He swore and raked his hands through his hair and she kept her eyes firmly on his face, not lowering them to watch the play of muscles and the stretch of his chest caused by the gesture for even a second. ‘I overslept,’ he muttered with a frown.

If that was the way he wanted to put it, she thought, swallowing hard and locking her knees because she might have peeked just for a moment and she might be feeling a bit faint, then that was up to him. If he thought it all right to drink himself into oblivion and shirk his responsibilities, then fine. ‘Apparently so.’

‘Long night,’ he said with a faint apologetic smile that didn’t mollify her in the slightest. ‘And an even longer day. On top of some pretty hideous jet lag.’

‘None of my business,’ she said, as interested in his excuses as much as she was interested in why he hadn’t had a woman in his bed for years. Which was absolutely not at all. ‘What is my business is that dinner’s in half an hour and people are wondering where you are, which is why Jake sent me to look for you.’

He nodded and rubbed a hand along his jaw. ‘I see.’

‘Do you?’ she asked a bit archly because there seemed to be an awful lot he hadn’t seen in the last ten minutes, such as the clipboard, which surely marked her out as anything other than a lady of the night and to which she was now clinging as if it were a reminder to keep a grip on the self-control that was badly in danger of unravelling. ‘Really? Well, that’s great. And now I have found you, I’ll be going.’

She shot him a quick, professional smile and then turned on her heel because she really had to get out of there before she either said or, worse, did something she’d regret, only to jerk to a halt when he said, ‘Wait.’

‘What?’ she said, swivelling round and seeing his smile deepen and turn into something so unexpected, so lethally attractive, that she went all hot and dizzy and once again forgot that she was anything other than a woman badly in need of kissing.

‘I believe I owe you an apology.’

She blinked, totally thrown by the switch in his demean-our and the change to his features, but somehow managed to keep that smile fixed to her face. ‘Accepted.’

‘I was out of order. Not thinking straight. Half asleep.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Forget it. I have. Now if you’ll excuse me, I ought to be getting back to the party, so I’ll tell Jake you’ll be down in, what, ten minutes?’

Leo ran a hand through his hair and then grimaced, his smile turning from lethal to wry, although no less devastating for it, and Abby steeled herself against its effect before taking a hasty step back towards the door, towards escape.

‘As for some reason I appear to smell like a distillery,’ he said dryly, ‘you’d better make it twenty.’

Twenty minutes might have been long enough to wash away the foul smell of stale whisky and douse the heat and desire that Abby had unexpectedly conjured up in him, but it wasn’t nearly long enough to figure out what the hell had been going on with him back there in his bedroom.

Tugging his cuffs out from beneath the sleeves of his jacket, Leo set his jaw and strode into the lift, the excruciating details of the last half an hour or so slamming into his head all over again.

Had he really accused her of basically being a prostitute? Had he really thought Jake would organise something like that? And had he really not only eyed her up but actually, for the briefest, maddest moment while overwhelmed by inexplicable lust, seriously considered taking her up on an offer that wasn’t even on the table?

What was the matter with him?

Feeling strangely short of breath in a way that had nothing to do with the faster-than-lightning descent of the lift, Leo ran a finger around the inside of his collar to ease it and wished he could wipe the whole mortifying scene from his brain.

There were faintly mitigating circumstances, it was true. His brain had been fogged up with sleep and he’d been disorientated. In something of a state of shock and very confused. And then there was the fact that he was absolutely exhausted as a result of work, travel and the time of the year, which always gave him sleepless nights and set him on edge.

But was any of that an excuse? No, it wasn’t. If he’d been thinking clearly he’d have waited for her to explain, would have given her at least the nanosecond of a chance before rushing in with his ridiculous assumptions. He’d have clocked the clipboard earlier and probably come to a very different conclusion.

He’d certainly have kept his mouth shut. Silence was an excellent and effective weapon, he knew that, and if only his brain hadn’t been completely addled he wouldn’t have dug himself into a hole so deep that, despite her apparent acceptance of his apology, he wasn’t sure he’d got out of it.

But then he hadn’t been thinking clearly. Or rationally. He hadn’t been thinking at all. At least not with his head. For the majority of their encounter he’d been thinking with a different part of his anatomy entirely.