PENNY JORDAN - The Tycoon's Virgin

She felt numbed by the sheer unacceptability of what she had done, shamed and filled with the bleakest sense of disbelief and despair.

Her lack of any response and her continued silence were just a ploy she was using as a form of gamesmanship, Leo decided as he watched her, and as for that anguished shock he had seen earlier in her eyes, well, as he had good cause to know, she was an extremely accomplished performer!

‘I have to go. Please let me past.’

The soft huskiness of her voice reminded Leo of the way she had moaned her desire to him during the night. What the hell was the matter with him? He couldn’t possibly still want her!

Even though he had made no move to stand away from the door, Jodi walked towards it as determinedly as she could. She had, she reminded herself, faced a whole roomful of disruptive teenage pupils of both sexes during her teacher training without betraying her inner fear. Surely she could outface one mere man? Only somehow the use of the word ‘mere’ in connection with this particular man brought a mirthless bubble of painful laughter to her throat.

This man could never be a ‘mere’ anything. This man…

She had guts, Leo acknowledged as she stared calmly past him, but then no doubt her chosen profession would mean that she was no stranger to the art of making a judicial exit.

It went against everything he believed in to forcibly constrain her, even though he was loath to let her go without reinforcing just what he thought of her and the man who was paying her.

Another second and she would have been so close to him that they would almost have been body to body, Jodi recognised on a mute shudder of distress as Leo finally allowed her access to the door. Expelling a shaky, pent-up breath of relief, she reached for the handle.

Leo waited until she had turned it before reminding her grimly, ‘Driscoll might think this was a clever move, but you can tell him from me that it wasn’t. Oh, and just a word of warning for you personally: any attempt to publicise what happened between us last night and I can promise you that any ridicule I suffer you will suffer ten times more.’

Jodi didn’t speak. She couldn’t. This was the most painful, the most shameful experience she had ever had or ever wanted to have.

But it seemed that Leo Jefferson still hadn’t finished with her, because as she stepped out into the hotel corridor he took hold of the door, placing his hand over hers in a grip that was like a volt of savage male electricity burning through her body.

‘Of course, if you’d been really clever you could have sold your story where it would have gained you the highest price already.’

Jodi couldn’t help herself; even though it was the last thing she wanted to do, she heard herself demanding gruffly, ‘What…what do you mean?’

The cynically satisfied smile he gave her made her shudder.

‘What I mean is that I’m surprised you haven’t tried to bargain a higher price for your silence from me than the price Driscoll paid you for your services.’

Jodi couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

‘I don’t…I didn’t…’ She began to defend herself instinctively, before shaking her head and telling him fiercely, ‘There isn’t any amount of money that could compensate me for what…what I experienced last night.’ And then, before he could say or do anything more to hurt her, she managed to wrench her hand from his and run down the corridor towards the waiting lift.

A girl wearing the uniform of a member of the hotel staff paused to look at her as Jodi left Leo’s suite, but Jodi was too engrossed in her thoughts to notice her.

Leo watched her go in furious disbelief. Just how much of a fool did she take him for, throwing out a bad Victorian line like that? And as for what she had implied, well, his body had certain very telltale marks on it that told a very different story indeed!

To Jodi’s relief, no one gave her a second glance as she hurried through the hotel foyer, heading for the exit. No doubt they were used to guests coming and going all the time.

‘Stop thinking about it,’ she advised herself as she stepped out into the bright morning sunlight, blinking a little in its brilliance.

The first thing she was going to do when she got home, Jodi decided as she drove out onto the main road, was have a shower, and the second was to compose the letter she would send to Leo Jefferson, putting to him the case for allowing the factory to remain open—there was no way she was going to try to make any kind of personal contact with him now!

And the third: the third was to go to bed and catch up on her sleep, and very firmly put what had happened between them out of her mind, consign it to a locked and deeply buried part of her memory that could never be accessed again by anyone!

Jodi opened the front door to her small cottage, one of a row of eight, built in the eighteenth century, with tiny, picturesque front gardens overlooking the village street and much longer lawns at the rear. After carefully locking up behind her she made her way upstairs.

It was the sound of her telephone ringing that finally woke her; groggily she reached for the receiver, appalled to see from her watch that it was gone ten o’clock. Normally at this time on a Saturday morning she would be in their local town, doing her weekly supermarket shop before meeting up with friends for lunch.

As luck would have it, she had made no such arrangement for today, as most of her friends were away on holiday with their families.

As her fingers curled round the telephone receiver her stomach muscles tensed, despite the fact that she knew it was impossible that her caller could be Leo Jefferson; after all, he didn’t even know who she was, thank goodness! A small frisson of nervous excitement tingled through her body, quickly followed by a strong surge of something she would not allow herself to acknowledge as disappointment when she recognised her cousin Nigel’s voice.

It was no wonder, after all she had been through, that her emotions should be so traumatised that they had difficulty in relaying appropriate reactions to her.

‘At last,’ she could hear Nigel saying cheerfully to her. ‘This is the third time I’ve rung. How did it go with Leo Jefferson? I’m dying to know.’

Jodi took a deep breath; she could feel her heart starting to pound as shame and guilt filled her. The hand holding the receiver felt sticky. She had never been a good liar; never been even a vaguely adequate one.

‘It didn’t,’ she admitted huskily.

‘You chickened out?’ Nigel guessed.

Jodi let out a sigh of relief; Nigel had just given her the perfect answer to her dilemma.

‘I…I was tired and I started to have second thoughts. And—’

Before she could tell Nigel that she had decided to write to Leo Jefferson rather than speak with him her cousin had cut across her to say tolerantly, ‘I thought you wouldn’t go through with it. Never mind. Uncle Nigel has ridden to the rescue for you. My boss has invited me over to dinner tonight, and I’ve asked him if I can take you along with me. He’ll be speaking to Leo Jefferson himself next week, and if you put your case to him I’m sure he’ll incorporate the plight of the school into his own discussion.’

‘Oh, Nigel, that’s very kind of you, but I don’t think…’ Jodi began to demur. She just wasn’t in the mood for a dinner party, and as for the idea of putting the school’s case to Nigel’s boss, who was the chief planning officer for the area, Jodi’s opinion of her own credibility had been so undermined that she just didn’t feel good enough about herself to do so.

Nigel, though, made it clear that he was not prepared to take no for an answer.

‘You’ve got to come,’ he insisted. ‘Graham really does want to meet you. His grandson is one of your pupils, apparently, and he’s a big fan of yours. The grandson, not Graham. Although…’

‘Nigel, I can’t go,’ Jodi protested.

‘Of course you can. You must. Think of your school,’ he teased her before adding, ‘I’m picking you up at half-past seven, and you’d better be ready.’

He had rung off before Jodi could protest any further.

Wearily Jodi studied the screen of her computer. She had spent most of the afternoon trying to compose a letter to send to Leo Jefferson. The headache she had woken up with had, thankfully, finally abated, but every time she tried to concentrate on what she was supposed to be doing a totally unwanted mental picture of Leo Jefferson kept forming inside her head. And it wasn’t just his face that her memory was portraying to her in intimate detail, she acknowledged as she felt herself turning as pink as the cascading petunias in her next-door neighbour’s window boxes. Mrs Fields, at eighty, was still a keen gardener, and as she had ruefully explained to Jodi she liked the strong, bright colours because she could see them.

Jodi’s own lovingly planted boxes were a more subtle combination of soft greens, white and silver, the same silver as Leo Jefferson’s sexy eyes.

Jodi’s face flamed even hotter as she stared at her screen and realised that she had begun her letter, ‘Dear Sexy Eyes’.

Quickly she deleted the words and began again, reminding herself of how important it was that she impress on Leo Jefferson the effect the closure of the factory would have not just on her school but also on the whole community.

All over the country small villages were dying or becoming weekend dormitories for city workers, although everyone here in their local community had worked hard to make theirs a living, working village.

If she could get Nigel’s boss on her side it was bound to help their case. Frowning slightly, she pushed her chair away from her computer. She ought to be used to fighting to keep the school going now. When she had first been appointed as its head teacher she had been told by the education authority that it would only be for an interim period, as, with the school’s numbers falling, it would ultimately have to be closed.

Even though she had known she would get better promotion and higher pay by transferring to a bigger school, as soon as Jodi had realised the effect that losing their school would have she had begun to canvass determinedly for new pupils, even to the extent of persuading parents who had previously been considering private education to give their local primary a chance.

Her efforts had paid off in more ways than one, and Jodi knew she would never forget the pride she had felt when their school had received an excellent report following an inspection visit.

Her pride wasn’t so much for herself, though, as for the efforts of the pupils and everyone else who had supported the school; to have to stand back and see all the ground they had gained lost, the sense of teamwork and community she had so determinedly fostered amongst the pupils destroyed, was more than she wanted to have to bear.

She had proved just how well the children thrived and learned in an atmosphere of security and love, in a school where they were known and valued as individuals, and Jodi was convinced that the self-confidence such a start gave them was something that would benefit them through their academic lives. But somehow, trying to explain all of this to Leo Jefferson was far harder than she had expected.

Perhaps it was because she suspected that he had already made up his mind, that, so far as he was concerned, the small community he would be destroying simply didn’t matter when compared with his profits. Or perhaps it was because all she could think about, all she could see, was last night and the way they had been together…