Читать книгу The Party Starts at Midnight - Lucy King - Страница 10

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.

At the image of Abby standing there, beautiful blue eyes flashing while she set him straight, magnificent in her indignation and her efforts to hide it, a wave of heat surged through him, making his pulse spike and, to his frustration, his body harden.

Ruthlessly deleting the image, Leo reminded himself of the ice-cold shower he’d just taken, and as the lift doors opened and he stepped out he decided to delete the rest of the episode up there in his bedroom too, because how the hell was he supposed to get through this evening if he kept remembering how much he’d wanted to take her to bed?

Doing up the button of his dinner jacket, he strode in the direction of the venue for tonight’s celebrations, searching for the clarity of thought and steely self-control he’d always taken for granted and just about finding it.

There was nothing he could do to undo what had happened, he reasoned, but with any luck his and Abby’s paths wouldn’t cross again. She’d be working and he’d be doing the thanking of his staff and attempting—though probably failing—to dispense the festive cheer she’d mentioned. Once the evening was over he’d never have to think of her or his fifteen minutes of complete mental meltdown ever again.

Taking a certain amount of comfort from that, Leo felt the churning in his stomach subside and the mess in his head dissolve, and walked through the double doors that led into the room that was being used to serve drinks and canapés.

Inwardly wincing at the noise level—which had to be ten times anything he’d ever encountered on a building site—he accepted a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter, and set about draining it in the hope it might obliterate the memory of that humiliating half an hour in his bedroom.

‘Good of you to make it,’ came a dry, amused voice from his left that had him jolting mid-swallow and nearly choking on the champagne.

‘Thanks for that,’ said Leo, once he’d recovered from both the champagne going down the wrong way and his brother’s efforts to rectify the situation, which had involved a lot of back thumping and drink spillage.

‘Sorry,’ said Jake, not sounding in the slightest bit apologetic. ‘So what kept you?’

‘Jet lag,’ he muttered. ‘Knocked me for six.’

‘Ah. I did wonder. I thought you might be deliberately avoiding the party.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘You hate them.’

That was true, but, ‘This isn’t a party,’ he said. ‘This is work.’

‘Try telling that to our guests.’

Leo swapped his empty glass for a full one, took a long gulp and forced himself to focus. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, his gaze drifting over the throngs of people all drinking and eating and full of the Christmas spirit he found so hard to muster up while he identified staff members, clients, architects, planning officers and financiers among the guests, and resolutely did not look for a certain slim, strawberry blonde event organiser.

‘Pretty good so far.’ Jake helped himself to something that looked like a mini Yorkshire pudding. ‘Thanks to Abby,’ he added. ‘Whom you’ve met, I gather.’

‘I have,’ said Leo, annoyed with himself for being tempted to seek her out when she shouldn’t even be crossing his mind, and then thinking that actually ‘met’ wasn’t quite the word he’d have used. Insulted. That was probably an appropriate one. Or offended. That would work equally well.

‘What did you think of her?’

He thought she was gorgeous. Sexy. Very very beddable. ‘I didn’t think anything of her, particularly,’ he said, his voice not betraying a hint of the lie. ‘Why?’

Jake wiped his fingers on a napkin and grinned. ‘Just wondering.’

‘What do you think of her?’ asked Leo before he could stop himself.

‘She’s great. Extremely capable. Has a knack for knowing exactly what’s needed, a talent for solving problems with the minimum amount of fuss and a rare ability to stick to the budget. Plus, she’s single and incredibly hot.’

Leo felt his jaw tighten for a second but channelled nonchalance he really didn’t feel and said, as if he couldn’t give a toss, ‘Is she? I hadn’t noticed.’ Which was another lie because like hell he hadn’t.

Jake grinned. ‘No, well, you wouldn’t, would you? A dozen naked women could parade right in front of you and you’d be oblivious.’

‘I prefer subtlety.’

‘As I don’t, I might ask her for a dance later.’

‘Go for it,’ said Leo, just about managing not to grit his teeth.

‘Although I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if she said no.’

‘Why?’

When Jake didn’t immediately answer, Leo glanced over to find his brother looking at him questioningly. ‘What the hell happened up there?’

Hmm.

Leo picked up a tiny blini topped with sour cream and caviar and ate it slowly, largely to give himself time to work out how he was going to respond, because wasn’t that the question of the night? And one to which there was no answer, because for one thing he still hadn’t entirely worked it out, and for another, hell would freeze over before he shared the details of the misunderstanding that made him look like such a complete and utter fool with anyone, least of all his no-holds-barred brother.

‘What do you mean, what happened up there?’ he said evenly, deciding that bluffing was the only way through this. ‘Nothing happened up there.’

‘Right,’ said Jake, clearly not believing him for a second. ‘Then why did Abby come down looking like thunder?’

Leo shrugged and kept his eyes on the party. ‘No idea,’ he said and took another gulp of champagne.

‘What did you do?’

‘Why would you think I did anything?’

‘It’s that time of year. Makes you morose. Edgy. Unpredictable. But more than that, she was fine when I asked her to go up and find you.’

‘Maybe she had a call. Maybe something’s gone wrong with the catering. Who knows?’

There was a pause and Leo glanced at Jake to find him looking back shrewdly. ‘I think I might have some idea.’

Leo went still, his fingers tightening around the stem of his glass as his pulse sped up. Had Abby said something? Given Jake a minute-by-minute account of what had happened? And were there perhaps ramifications to what he’d done? Hadn’t people been sued for less?

‘Really?’ he said, hedging his bets but bracing himself for the worst.

Jake nodded. ‘Yup. She’s a perfectionist. She doesn’t like things to go wrong.’

‘No, well, what event planner would?’

‘So perhaps finding you passed out after a drinking session piqued her sense of responsibility and orderliness.’

Leo frowned and wondered if his brain was still on go-slow because what on earth was Jake on about? What drinking session? ‘Passed out?’ he echoed.

‘That was her guess.’

‘It was the wrong one.’

‘You should have mentioned the jet lag,’ said Jake dryly. ‘Then she might have been a little less disapproving.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Leo, wishing that his state of sobriety had been the only misunderstanding of the night.

‘Why, what else happened?’ said Jake, and Leo mentally kicked himself for forgetting that while his brother sometimes came across as being so laid-back he was horizontal, he also had a sky-high IQ and an irritating talent for zooming in on things that one might prefer to be glossed over.

‘There may have been a slight misunderstanding,’ he said, resigning himself to the knowledge that he was going to have to divulge at least something of the events of half an hour ago because Jake could be surprisingly tenacious when the mood took him.

‘What kind of misunderstanding?’

‘Nothing important, and it was cleared up.’

‘Did it involve me?’

‘Why would you think it involved you?’

‘Because when she was telling me you were on your way down she kept giving me the filthiest looks. It made me want to ditch the champagne and break into the bottle of single malt I was planning on giving to you.’

Leo went still. ‘Single malt?’

‘To drown your woes and cheer you up. The present I was talking about to get you through Christmas.’

‘That was the present?’

‘Of course. What else would I have meant?’

What else indeed? Damn. He really had got things wrong. Badly badly wrong.

‘Are you all right?’

Leo snapped back to find his brother watching him closely. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘You’ve gone pale and you’re frowning.’

‘I’m fine.’ Or he would be once he’d come to terms with the realisation that for the first time in years he’d abandoned logic, reason and self-control, and had basically totally lost his mind.

What the hell was wrong with him this evening? he wondered for what felt like the hundredth time. Was it really merely jet lag and the time of year? Or was he coming down with something? Something he’d picked up on his travels maybe?

More to the point, why was Jake looking at him like that?

‘Oh, my God,’ said his brother, his jaw dropping as his expression turned to one of disbelief. ‘You didn’t.’

‘I didn’t what?’

‘Think Abby was the present.’

‘Of course not,’ said Leo with a short laugh that didn’t sound as dismissive as he’d intended.

‘You did.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘I’m not the one being absurd. You did. You really did. And you claim to prefer subtlety.’

As this was a conversation he really didn’t want to be having Leo ran a hand along his jaw, shifted his attention to the party going on in front of them and, in a probably pointless effort at distraction, said, ‘Did I mention how great this place looks? Excellent tree.’

‘Forget the decorations,’ said Jake, sounding astounded, incredulous and appalled. ‘How on earth could you think I’d ever do something like that?’

Leo arched an eyebrow and swung his gaze back to his brother. ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’

Jake looked as stunned as if he’d thumped him in the stomach. ‘What?’

‘Remember the stripper?’

‘That was twelve years ago,’ said his brother, after a moment. ‘For a mate for his eighteenth birthday, and he’d specifically requested it. Don’t you think I might have matured a bit since then?’ He ran his hands through his hair and then shook his head in disbelief. ‘Jeez,’ he said, blowing out a breath. ‘Thanks for that. I think I might be seriously offended.’

‘I think Abby might have been too.’

There was another stunned silence as Jake stared at him apparently briefly lost for words. ‘You confronted her with it?’

Leo shrugged, keeping the cringing very firmly on the inside. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. Half asleep, in fact. Disorientated. Like I said, jet lag.’

‘Not an excuse.’

‘I know.’

‘How did she take it?’

‘How do you think?’

Jake, who wasn’t nearly as good as Leo at containing his emotions, winced. ‘Did you apologise?’

‘Yes.’

‘And explain?’

‘I didn’t get the chance. She didn’t stick around.’

Now he thought about it, he hadn’t had a woman flee from him quite so fast since the excruciating afternoon exactly five years ago when Lisa had raced back down the aisle the wrong way, leaving him standing, jilted, at the altar. But he could hardly blame Abby. He’d probably been lucky to get away without a slap to the face.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Jake.

‘Neither am I.’

There was a moment’s silence during which Jake, presumably struggling to come to terms with what had happened, gave his head a couple more shakes in disbelief. Then he sobered, fixed Leo with a look that spoke volumes and said, ‘So do you think it’s going to be a problem?’

‘Not if I can help it,’ said Leo darkly as a pair of doors swung open and dinner was announced.