‘You mean—you just let him get away with kissing you and propositioning you like that?’
‘I would have let him take me on the office floor if he’d wanted to,’ Jemma said drily. ‘That was the level I’d sunk to!’
‘My God!’ Trina sat back and stared. ‘I can’t believe it! Wait till I tell Frew! He’ll go bananas! He claims the man hasn’t been born who can get through your thick shell!’
‘Well, thanks very much, Frew!’ Jemma cried. ‘And what gives him the right to think he knows anything at all about me?’
‘Come off it, Jemma!’ Trina scoffed. ‘You and me both know you’re as picky as a worm in a barrel of apples! How many twenty-four-year-old virgins do you think Frew knows?’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say!’ Jemma flared, jumping to her feet and dropping the lovely peach on to the table. The soft velvet skin split open, allowing the sweet, sensual scent of its juicy fruit to seep out. It assailed her nostrils, whetted her tastebuds, and she had to close her eyes because she was suddenly thrown into a storm of sensation that was all directed by one cleverly manipulative man.
‘Your parents are entirely to blame for that!’ Trina went on, unaware of the torment going on inside Jemma. ‘If it wasn’t your father having some torrid affair with another woman it was your mother paying him back by putting it about with some other man! What an example they set you! And now look at you!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re standing there, trembling with indignation over Frew’s impression of you when you know damned well it’s only the truth! You’re afraid of starting your sexual ball rolling, Jemma,’ she stated bluntly, ‘just in case you discover that you’ve got more of your parents in you than you can deal with!’
‘Do you want me to bed the very next man who walks in that door just to prove you wrong?’ she flared, her eyes snapping open to glare at her so-called best friend.
Trina’s mouth twitched. ‘Not if it’s my Frew, you’d better not,’ she warned. ‘Or it will be your first and last experience.’
‘Oh, go to hell, Tri,’ Jemma sighed, deflated by her flatmate’s unfailing sense of humour.
‘Don’t you see what’s happened to you today, Jemma?’ Trina appealed on a more serious note. ‘You’ve been so determined to keep your emotions under a tight lid that when a man like Leon Stephanades came along your senses boiled up and the lid flew off so they all came shooting out like steam under pressure! That’s why you made such a damned fool of yourself with him!’
‘Thanks for the analysis,’ Jemma grunted, and sat down again. ‘You’ve made me feel so much better!’
‘I was not attempting to make you feel better,’ Trina sighed. ‘Only understand why you responded to him as you did! The man is a god among men. You’ve ambled along quite nicely while only confronted with mere mortals, but when it came to a godlike being you blew your emotional top!’
‘Josh would not take kindly to being classed as mere mortal,’ Jemma pointed out.
‘Josh Tanner,’ Trina stated deridingly, ‘does not even get a look-in compared to your Leon.’
‘Tell that to Cassie,’ Jemma grimaced. And she told Trina the rest of what had happened today.
‘Oh, my,’ her friend drawled when she finished. ‘Now I see what your Leon means when he writes about nasty tastes and smells. The whole thing stinks and tastes bad.’
‘He is not my Leon!’ Jemma angrily pointed out.
‘No?’ Trina quizzed. ‘Then what are you going to do about him?’
‘Nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘Just ignore him until he goes away.’
But that was not as easy as it sounded. Mainly because Leon Stephanades refused to be ignored. Over the coming week, Jemma was barraged with reminders of his existence and his intentions.
First there was a long velvet case hand-delivered to her flat with the logo of a very exclusive jeweller embossed on its lid. It contained a fine gold bracelet, linked at its clasp by a single turquoise. ‘The colour of your eyes, don’t you agree?’ the accompanying note said. Jemma closed the lid and put it away, determined to give it back to him at the first opportunity she got. The next day came the matching earrings. On Thursday the matching necklace. ‘Wear them for me on our first night together,’ the accompanying note said.
Her mouth tightened, the idea that he thought he could buy her like this filling her with an icy anger, and she discarded the necklace into her dressing-table drawer with the same contempt with which she had discarded the bracelet and earrings. On Friday there was nothing. No special delivery to come home to, no note, nothing. Trina studied her face sagely, and Jemma lifted her chin in a defiant refusal to utter a single word.
That night she accepted a date with a man who had just moved into the flat below. He was an architect, just finding his feet in the big London company he had recently joined. He was good-looking, pleasant and companionable, and by the time the evening was drawing to a close Jemma was beginning to feel at peace with herself for the first time in a week.
If it hadn’t been bad enough having Leon obsess her every waking thought, then trying to work with Josh in the mood he was in had been just as bad. Not that she blamed him for it—he had every right to behave like a bear with a sore head. But Cassie’s constant phone calls, pleading to speak with him, had taken their toll on Jemma’s nerves. And when his persistent refusal to speak to her had only had Cassie pouring out her heart on Jemma’s ears instead, the tension inside her had begun to hit an all-time high.
So she was quite happy to give herself up to the light, congenial company of Tom MacDonald. As his name suggested, he was a Scot, and eager to make new friends. They talked about anything and everything over a quiet dinner in a small Italian restaurant a short walk away from their flats. He told her about his life in a small Scottish village just outside Edinburgh where his rector father and forbearing mother had reared a family of six boisterous children in the big, rambling vicarage home, and where he had sometimes been willing to sell his soul for a bit of privacy. And she told him about her life as an only child who’d spent her childhood worrying which of her parents was going to walk out next—or, worse, whether they both would at the same time. It surprised her that she told him all of this since the only other person she had ever discussed her lonely uncertain childhood with had been Trina—or maybe, she decided later, it was because of what Trina had said to her the other night that had made her open up to Tom. Whatever. By the time they walked back home, she was feeling comfortable enough to make another date with him for the next night.
They parted at his flat door since it was on a lower landing than her own, and she let him kiss her, half relieved, half disappointed that fireworks had not gone off in her head as they had done when Leon had kissed her.
Trina was still up when she got in, reclining across Frew, who was stretched out on the sofa watching the end of a cops and robbers film.
‘Guess who’s been calling you all night?’ Trina taunted lazily.
Jemma went cold inside. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, hoping to God that she was right, and she didn’t know.
‘Mr Macho Stephanades himself, no less.’ Frew dashed Jemma’s hopes in one sardonically uttered sentence. ‘I answered the last time,’ he told her drily. ‘And received the kind of reply that had me running to the mirror to see if my throat had been cut.’
‘Ha-ha, very funny,’ Jemma jeered and turned a cool face on Trina. ‘I hope you told him to get lost,’ she said.
‘Me?’ her flatmate squeaked. ‘Why should I tell him to get lost? He’s not my problem! Although...’ she added with a teasing glance at Frew ‘...hearing that gorgeous sexy voice purring down the line at me had me thinking it would be quite something to have him as a problem.’
‘He’d eat you for breakfast