Michelle Reid - Passion Becomes You

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘I just find it hard to believe she actually did it deliberately,’ she confessed.

‘Women are devious creatures, Miss Davis,’ he said heavily. ‘They will go to any lengths to achieve their own ends.’

‘Thank you.’ She smiled tightly. ‘Generalisations like that keep the world turning, I suppose.’

‘They do in my sphere,’ he said cynically.

His sphere—who the hell did he think he was? Were all women supposed to be as unscrupulous as Cassie? ‘Well,’ she said, coming stiffly to her feet and making a play of gathering her telephone notes together, ‘I shall try to remember that when I decide to go hunting, and make a wide berth of your—sphere.’

‘Now that,’ he murmured, ‘would be a great pity.’

She glanced up, drawn by the husky message in his voice. Their eyes clashed, and she stopped breathing, drowning instead in the dark, deep promise burning in his eyes.

No, she told herself from some hazy distance in the back of her foggy mind. Don’t let this happen. Think of Cassie weeping in the next room. Think of Josh, just another version from the same mould as this man. Ruthless, selfish women-eaters.

He reached across the desk and touched a thumb to her mouth, drawing it downwards to part her lips a little. The softly padded flesh beneath his touch grew hot as blood began pumping into it, swelling it, assailing her with the most erotically sensual experience of her life.

‘No strings,’ he murmured so softly that she barely caught the words above the sudden roaring inside her head. ‘No commitments other than that while we are together we neither of us turn to anyone else. When it is over, we part honestly, as friends. I will be your only lover. And I will give myself exclusively to you.’

The hand moved, sliding beneath her hair to curve her nape, then he was leaning towards her, drawing her towards him across the width of the desk, and he replaced the caressing finger with his mouth. It was cool and firm, her own hot and excruciatingly sensitised flesh contracting in reaction so that she jumped, startled as if stung.

‘Think about it,’ he murmured as he drew away again. ‘And I will call you soon. Now.’ While she blinked, still lost in the sensual daze he had so easily wrapped around her, Leon Stephanades straightened up and became the cool businessman. ‘I will take Cassandra home. Tell Tanner I will be out of the country for a about a week. If he wishes to deal with me then he had better be available when I get back.’ He turned to go back to Josh’s office, then spun back again, his expression darkening when he saw how thoroughly he had incapacitated her, but that was all; he gave no other indication that he had just made the most audacious proposition Jemma had ever heard. ‘You can also tell him that, no matter what his decision will be about Cassandra’s condition, as her good friend, I expect her to be treated with respect. She is only human, after all, and humans are by nature fallible.’

‘FALLIBLE?’ Josh snarled, prowling around his office like an angry bull. ‘The bitch isn’t fallible. She’s like an armoured tank, equipped with the most modern killing devices known to man!’

He had been in the office ten minutes—arriving just ten minutes after Leon had taken a wilting Cassie away.

‘She said to tell you she’d be in touch.’ Jemma relayed that message too. But she did not inject the same amount of tight defiance into it that Cassie had done. She hadn’t dared. As it was, he hit the roof.

‘I don’t wish to set eyes on the conniving bitch again!’ he bit out, then swung on Jemma, his grey eyes as hard and as sharp as glass. ‘Did she tell you she did it deliberately?’

Jemma nodded. ‘Leon Stephanades got it out of her.’

‘And how fortunate for her that he was around!’ The jeer was bitter and cutting. ‘For all I know, they probably planned it between them!’

‘What, that man aiding and abetting in stitching up another of his kind?’ She only heard her own contempt once the words had left her tongue. ‘He would rather cut his own throat first!’

‘And what do you know about him?’ Josh challenged deridingly. ‘As far as I am aware, you only met him for the first time today.’

And what a meeting, Jemma thought with a small shiver. ‘It doesn’t take much to recognise the type, Josh,’ she murmured drily. ‘I recognised it in you on first sighting, too.’

His eyes sharpened, something in her tone diverting his attention from his own problems for a moment. ‘Proposition you, did he?’ he mocked. She blushed—enough of an answer in itself. ‘Well, I hope you had the good sense to give him the same put-down you gave me,’ he said grimly. ‘Because that guy is big-league. He plays to different rules from the rest of us.’

‘As far as I can see,’ she retaliated, simply because she felt uncomfortable in knowing that, far from putting Leon Stephanades down, she had virtually thrown herself at him, ‘you’re both tarred with the same brush!’

‘Only he’s a darn sight more powerful than me,’ Josh pointed out.

‘How powerful?’ Jemma asked curiously, beginning to tingle again, just talking about him.

‘Among the top twenty richest families in the world—that powerful,’ Josh answered, then ran his fingers through his straight blond hair in frustration. ‘And God help any woman who tried to pull Cassie’s dirty trick on him!’ he grunted, slumping down in a chair.

‘Josh...’ Jemma put out a hand to touch his arm in appeal. ‘Cassie loves you! I know she does! What she’s done is stupid and wrong,’ she acknowledged. ‘But I am sure she did it out of love! Doesn’t that count for anything?’

He shook his head. ‘Does love deceive, Jemma?’ he challenged. ‘Does it betray trust, connive to trap? Is it selfish and greedy and bloody ruthless?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, hurting for him because she could see the real hurt his anger was trying to hide. ‘Because I’ve never been in love to know.’

‘I feel betrayed,’ he confessed. ‘Bloody betrayed!’

They sat in dull silence for a while after that, Jemma completely sympathising with Josh even though she could partly understand Cassie’s motives. The woman had not tried to hide her ultimate goal, after all. Marriage and children. The full works. But the really sad fact among all of it was that Jemma had a sneaking suspicion that Cassie would have got it all from Josh if she’d only been a bit more patient. He’d been crumbling, she was sure of it. But now...?

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked him huskily.

He sighed and got up. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered flatly. ‘All I do know is that she’s had it as far as I—me personally—am concerned. She’s pregnant; there isn’t a damned thing I can do about that now. If she wants to keep it, then I’ll support her and it. If she wants an abortion, then I’ll pay for it. But if she wants me, she can go to hell before she’ll get me again.’

Fagged to death by the time she let herself into her flat that night, Jemma just dropped her bag and sank into the nearest chair. They had managed to get some work done during the afternoon, but not much, and what there was had been achieved in a grim mutual silence that had eventually left its mark on her throbbing head.

Trina walked into the room, chewing on a banana. ‘Bad day?’ she enquired when she saw Jemma’s drained face.

‘Hmm,’ was all she could manage.

‘Want cheering up?’ Trina, the sexiest Mrs Mop in the domestic cleaning game, tended to finish work several hours before Jemma, simply because most people liked their homes cleaned and vacated before three o’clock in the afternoon. She ran her own business from the flat with the help of a veritable army of part-timers who worked in teams, and not one of them wore a turban on her head or dared have a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. They wore uniforms which rivalled the smartest airline ones, and they travelled around in neat little vans with neat little smiles and a brisk friendly manner. They were all paid well, but then Trina’s charges were high. You get what you pay for, was her motto, and London, especially up-market London, had accepted and acknowledged that long ago. Trina had a waiting-list of potential clients almost as long as her list of real ones. She’d wanted to expand at one time, but the current recession had put paid to that idea—that and her super-sharp accountant-cum-boyfriend Frew. Trina was a tall, slim, easygoing redhead, with green eyes, a sharp tongue and a nasty sense of humour.