Then he bit out a terse, ‘Excuse us…’ to Natasha, and he was manhandling the screaming woman out of the bedroom.
The door thudded shut in his wake. Natasha found that her legs couldn’t hold her up a moment longer and she sank in a whooshing loss of energy down onto the edge of the bed.
Beyond the door, Rasmus was just stepping out of the lift. Leo sent him a glancing blow of a look and his security chief paled. ‘I’m sorry, Leo,’ he jerked out. ‘I don’t know—’
‘Get her out of here,’ Leo gritted. ‘Take her home and sober her up.’
Gianna had stopped fighting and screeching now and was sobbing into his chest and clinging instead. Disgust flayed Leo’s insides when it took the controlled strength of both men to transfer her from himself to Rasmus and get her into the lift.
‘I don’t know how she got in here,’ Rasmus said helplessly.
‘But you will do,’ Leo lanced out. ‘Then see to it that whoever it was on your staff she laid in return for the favour is gone from here,’ he instructed, then stabbed the button that shut the lift doors.
Alone in the hallway, he spun round in a full circle, then grabbed the back of his neck. Anger was pumping away inside him, contempt—repugnance. Having taken a telephone call from Gianna when he first arrived here, he’d told her that she had to get the hell off his back!
Her barging in here had been deliberate. Even the angry shrieking had been a put-up job. And the fact that she would not think twice about seducing one of his staff to get what she wanted was just another side to her twisted personality that filled him with disgust!
‘Theos,’ he muttered, long legs driving him through the apartment and pulling him to a halt outside the closed bedroom door, the knowledge that he’d lost the towel again having no effect on him at all.
He wasn’t stupid. He knew that Gianna’s nicely timed interruption had been a set-up, just as he knew the comparison Natasha had drawn from the moment it all kicked off.
Rico with her sister.
A curse ripped from him, followed by another. He paced out the width of the hall trying to clamp down on the anger still erupting inside him because—how the hell did he explain a sex-obsessed feline like Gianna, who only functioned this side of sane while she knew that he was always going to be around to help pick her up when she fell apart?
You didn’t explain it. It was too damn complicated, he recognised as he took in a grim breath of air, then threw open the bedroom door.
Natasha was back in the blue suit, and she was stuffing her things back into her bag.
‘Don’t you pull a hysterical scene on me,’ he rasped, closing the door with a barely controlled thud.
His voice sent a quiver down Natasha’s tense spinal cord. ‘I’m not hysterical,’ she responded quietly.
‘Then what do you call the way you are packing that bag?’
The searing thrust of his anger shocked even Leo as Natasha swung round to stare at him. Miss Cold and Prim was back with a vengeance, Leo saw, and she was stirring him up like…
She saw it happen, and lifted a pair of frosty blue eyes to his. ‘Is that response due to her by any chance?’ And her voice dripped disdain.
Hell, Leo cursed. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, not sure exactly what it was he was apologising for—the snarling way he had spoken to her or his uncontrolled…
She spun her back to him again. Snapping his lips together, he strode over to the bank of glossy white wardrobes and tugged open one of the doors. A second later he was pulling a pair of jeans up his legs.
‘She’s mad,’ he muttered.
‘Enter the beautiful mad wife—exit the short, fat other woman.’ Natasha pushed a pair of shoes into the bag. ‘Ex-wife,’ he corrected, tugging his zip up. ‘Try telling her that.’
‘I do tell her—constantly. As you saw for yourself, she does not listen—and you are not going anywhere, Natasha, so you can stop packing that bag.’
Straightening up, Natasha meant to spear him with another crushing look, only to find herself lose touch with what they were saying when she saw him standing there with his long legs encased in faded denim and looking like a whole new kind of man. Her heart gave a telling stuttering thud. Her breathing faltered. He was so blatantly, beautifully masculine it took a fight to drag her covetous mind back on track.
‘S-so you thought you might as well make her listen by hitting her with that lie about a future wife?’
A frown darkened his lean features and made the bump on his nose stand out. ‘It was not a lie, Natasha,’ he declared like a warning.
‘Oh, yes, it was,’ she countered that. ‘I wouldn’t marry you if my life depended on it.’
‘You mean, you are here merely to use me for sex?’
The sardonic quip was out before Leo could stop it.
‘Substitute!’ she tossed right back at him like the hot sting from a whip. ‘And not even that again,’ she added, yanking her eyes away from him altogether and zipping up the hastily packed bag with enough violence to threaten the teeth on the zip.
Easing his shoulders back against the wardrobe door, Leo folded his arms across his hair-roughened chest. ‘So I was a tacky one-night substitute, then,’ he prodded.
‘Very tacky.’ Pressing her lips together, she nodded in confirmation, then parted her lips to add bitterly, ‘God save me from the super-rich class. Everything they do is so tacky it constantly makes me want to be sick.’
‘Was that aimed at me, Gianna or Rico?’
‘All three,’ she said, frowning as she sent her eyes hunting the room for her purse. She couldn’t see it anywhere and she couldn’t recall when she had last had it in her hand.
‘Lost something valuable?’ his hatefully smooth voice questioned. ‘Like your virginity, perhaps?’
It was as good as a hard slap in the face. Natasha tugged in a hot breath. ‘I’ve just remembered why I dislike you so much.’
His wide shoulders gave a deeply bronzed shrug against the white wardrobe. He looked like some brooding dark male model posing for one of the big fashion magazines, Natasha thought, feebly aware that her eyes refused to stay away from him for more than ten seconds before they dragged themselves back again because he was so bone-tinglingly good to look at. Sexuality oozed out of every exposed manly pore and those jeans should be X-rated. How had she ever thought that he was nothing to look at next to Rico? If Rico dared to stride in here right now and stand next to this man, Natasha knew she wouldn’t even see him. Leo won hands down in each single aspect of his dominant masculine make-up—even the bump in his nose yelled sexually exciting unreconstructed male at her!
Oh, what’s happening to me? On that helplessly bewildered inward groan, she yanked her eyes away from him—yet again—and made them search the room for her purse! In less than a day it felt as if everything she’d ever held firm about herself had been corkscrewed out of her then mixed around violently before being shoved back inside her to form this entirely new perspective on everything!
And the way he was standing there looking at her with his eyes thoughtfully narrowed just wasn’t right, either—as if he was considering striding over here and showing her the tough way in which this new order of things worked.
A sensation Natasha just did not want to feel spread itself right down her front. Tense upper lip quivering—she just had to get out of here.
‘Have you seen my purse?’
‘What do you need it for?’
Straightening