She was tall and willowy, from the little he could make out under the cheap store uniform, and she had the sort of wide-eyed innocence that was always accompanied in his head with the strident ringing of alarm bells. Her skin was smooth and satiny and the colour of pale caramel, as though she had been toasted in the sun. Her hair was tied back, but the bits escaping were a shade darker than her skin, toffee-coloured with strands of strawberry blonde running through it.
And her eyes...
She abruptly stopped what she was doing and looked up, gazing directly back at him.
Her eyes were green—as clear as glass washed up on a beach.
The kick of sexual attraction, a lust as raw as anything he’d ever felt before, shot through him like a bolt of adrenaline, and Leo felt himself harden in immediate response. It was fierce enough to take his mind off everything that had hitherto been occupying it.
His stiffened shaft was painful, and he had to adjust his position to release some of the pressure. As their eyes tangled he thought that if she kept looking at him like that, making him imagine what it would be like to have that succulent full mouth circling the throbbing, rigid length of him, he would soon be desperate for release.
He began walking towards her, every hunting instinct inside him honing in on his prey. He’d never wanted any woman with such urgent immediacy before and Leo wasn’t about to ignore the pull. When it came to sex, he was a man who had always got what he wanted—and he wanted this woman with every fibre in his body.
The closer he got to her, the more stupendously pretty she was. Her huge eyes were almond-shaped, fringed with very dark lashes that seemed to contradict the colour of her hair. Her lips, parted, were sensuous and full, even though their startled-in-the-headlights expression was teasingly innocent. And her body...
The unappealing, clinical white dress, belted at the waist, should have been enough to dampen any man’s ardour, but instead it sent his imagination into frantic overdrive and he caught himself wondering what her breasts would look like, what they would taste like...
* * *
‘Can I help you?’ Maddie’s heart was beating like a sledgehammer, but her expression was studiously polite as she met the stranger’s openly appreciative gaze.
Man sees girl. Man is attracted to girl. Man makes beeline for girl because he has one thing on his mind and that’s getting her into bed with him.
Maddie was used to that response from the opposite sex. She hated it.
What was even more galling was the fact that this particular man had, just for a second, aroused something in her other than her usual instinct to slam down the shutters hard the minute she saw a come-on situation on the horizon.
In fact, for a second, she had felt a stirring between her thighs—a tingling, tickly melting that had horrified her.
‘Interesting question,’ the man murmured, positioning himself directly in front of her.
The look in her eyes seemed to amuse him.
‘Are you looking for make-up?’ Maddie asked bluntly. ‘Because if so you’re in the wrong department. I could always point you in the right direction.’
In response, the man randomly picked up a jar from the precarious display she had been fiddling with earlier and twirled it in his hand.
‘What’s this if not make-up?’
Maddie removed it from him and swivelled it so that the label was facing him. ‘Regenerating night cream, targeting a woman in her sixties,’ she said crisply. ‘Are you interested in buying it?’
‘Oh, I’m interested,’ he said, in a tone laced with innuendo.
‘Well, that’s all I’m selling, so if it’s not what you’re interested in you should probably keep moving.’
Maddie folded her arms. She knew she was blushing. She also knew that her body was misbehaving. Once upon a time, it had misbehaved before, and she still had the scars to show for that. A repeat performance wasn’t on the cards—especially not with some arrogant guy too good-looking for his own good.
‘Are we cutting to the chase, here?’ Leo purred, rising to the challenge and liking it. ‘Who’s to say I’m not...interested...in that very expensive pot of cream for my mother?’
‘Oh!’ Maddie flushed. She’d misread the situation.
At this rate, sampling how things worked on the shop floor was going to get her precisely nowhere—because she clearly had no idea about effective salesmanship. But then she’d never stood behind a counter selling anything in her entire life.
Yet again she wondered whether she was doing the right thing. Was she? Three and a half weeks ago she’d received the startling news that she was the sole beneficiary of a bequest that included a department store, a house, and various assorted paraphernalia—courtesy of a grandfather she had never seen, nor met, and never really known existed.
Having been struggling to make ends meet, and living the sort of disastrous life she had never imagined possible, she had already been asking herself what direction she needed to take to wipe away the past couple of years of her life, or at least to put it all in perspective, and wham—just like that, she’d received her answer.
She’d arrived in Ireland still barely able to believe her good fortune, with big plans to sell the store, the house and whatever else there was to sell, so that she could buy herself the dream that had eluded her for so many years.
An education.
With money in the bank she would be able to get to university, an ambition she had had to abandon when her mother had become ill four years previously. She would be able to throw herself into the art course she had always wanted to do without fear of finding herself begging on street corners to pay for the privilege.
She would be able to make something of herself—and that meant a lot, because she felt that she’d spent much of her life being buffeted by the winds of fate, carried this way and that with no discernible goal propelling her forward.
But she’d taken one look at the store and one look at the house she had inherited—full of charm despite the fact that it was practically falling down—and she’d dumped all her plans to sell faster than a rocket leaving earth. Art school could wait—the store needed her love and her help now.
Anthony Grey, the lawyer who had arranged to see her so that he could go over every single disadvantage of hanging on to what, apparently, was a business on its last legs and a house that was being propped up only by the ivy growing around it, had talked to her for three hours. She had listened with her head tilted to one side, hands on her knees, and had then promptly informed him that she was going to try and make a go of it.
And that, first and foremost, entailed getting to know what it was she intended making a go of. Which, in turn, necessitated her working on the shop floor so that she could see where the cracks were and also hopefully pick up what was being said by the loyal staff who suspected that their jobs might be hanging in the balance.
A couple of weeks under cover and Maddie was sure she would be able to get a feel for things.
Optimism hadn’t been her companion for a very long time and she had been enjoying it.
Until now. She’d jumped to all sorts of conclusions and screwed up. She pinned a smile to her face, because the way too good-looking man staring down at her, with the most incredible navy blue eyes she had ever seen in her life, looked rich and influential, even though he was kitted out in a pair of faded black jeans and a polo shirt.
There was something about his lazy, loose-limbed stance, the way he oozed self-confidence, the latent strength of his body...
She felt it