Pride & Consequence Omnibus (28 page)

She had no idea how long she had been sitting on the bench confiding in this stranger, but now she felt so tired and drained that she longed to go home and lie down.

As she got up she gave her unknown companion a tired smile.

‘Thank you for listening to me.’ She turned to go, but as she did so the other woman stood up too, and to Jodi’s shock took hold of her in a warm embrace, hugging her almost tenderly.

‘Have courage,’ she told her. ‘All will be well. I am sure of it.’

As she smiled comfortingly at her, Jodi had the oddest feeling that there was something about the woman that was somehow familiar, but that, of course, was ridiculous. Jodi knew that she had never seen her before.

CHAPTER TEN

‘L
EONARDO
,
YOU
ARE
to drive back to Frampton right now.’

‘Mamma,’ Leo protested.

‘Right now, Leonardo!’ Luisa Jefferson insisted. ‘And before you do, could you please explain to me how it is that poor Jodi believes that you wish not only to deny yourself as a father the child you have created with her, but that you wish to deny it the right to life as well?’

‘What...what child? Jodi told me there would be no child.’

‘And she told me that there will be, not that I needed telling; I could see it in her eyes...her face. You have hurt her very badly. She truly believes that you do not love her and she is hurting because she thinks she loves a man who would destroy her child.’

‘I cannot understand how she could possibly think that!’ Leo protested. ‘I would never—’

‘I know that, of course,’ his mother interrupted him, ‘but your Jodi, it seems, does not. “Something will have to be arranged”, is apparently what you told her.’

‘What...? Yes...of course...but I meant...I meant that if she was pregnant we would have to get married,’ Leo told his mother grimly. ‘How on earth could she interpret that as...?’

‘She is the one you should be speaking to, Leonardo, and not me. And you had better be quick. She plans to leave, and once she does...’

‘I’m on my way,’ Leo announced. ‘If you dare to say anything to her until I get there you will be banned from seeing your grandchild until he or she is at least a day old.’

When she replaced her telephone receiver Luisa Jefferson was smiling beatifically.

Picking it up again, she dialled the number of her home in Italy. When her husband, Leo’s father, answered she greeted him, ‘Hello, Grandpapa!’

* * *

‘Oh, come on, Jodi, I’m starving and I hate going out for dinner on my own.’

‘But, Nigel, I’m tired,’ Jodi had protested when Nigel had rung her unexpectedly, demanding that she go out to eat with him, ‘and surely you could ask one of your many girlfriends.’

But in the end she had given in and she had even managed not to protest when, having picked her up in his car, he had suddenly realised that he must have dropped his wallet on her footpath and gone back to pick it up.

Now, though, at barely ten o’clock, she was exhausted, and yawning, and she couldn’t blame Nigel for glancing surreptitiously at his watch.

She hadn’t been the most entertaining of companions.

Even so, his brisk, ‘Right, let’s go,’ after he had checked his watch a second time made her blink a little.

‘Don’t you want to finish your coffee?’ she asked him.

‘What? Oh, no...I can see you’re tired,’ he offered.

He had been in an odd mood all evening, Jodi recognised, on edge and avoiding looking directly at her. But she was too tired to ask him what was wrong, instead allowing him to bustle her out into the car park and into his car.

Once they reached her house, Jodi asked him if he wanted to come in, but rather to her surprise he shook his head.

As she heard him drive away Jodi decided that she might as well go straight upstairs to bed.

In Jodi’s sitting room the light from her computer screen lit up the small space around it, but Jodi was too exhausted to bother glancing into the room, and so she didn’t see the smiling babies tumbling in somersaults all over her computer screen around the large typed message that read, ‘I love ya, baby, and your mamma too!’

Once upstairs, she went straight to the bathroom, cleaning off her make-up and showering before padding naked into the darkened bedroom she was too familiar with to need to switch on the light.

She was already virtually asleep before she even pulled back the duvet and crawled into the longed-for comfort of her bed—the good old-fashioned king-size bed that almost filled the room and which Nigel had wickedly insisted on buying her as a cousinly moving-in gift. It was a bed that no one other than her had ever slept in—though someone was quite definitely sleeping in it now!

It was a someone she would have known anywhere, even without the benefit of being able to see his face. She would have known him simply by his scent, by the subtle air of Leo-ness that enfolded her whenever she was in his presence.

Leo! Leo was here, fast asleep in her bed! No, that just wasn’t possible! She was going mad. She was daydreaming...fantasising!

‘Mmm.’ Jodi gasped as a decidedly realistic pair of warm arms wrapped themselves firmly around her body, imprisoning it against their owner’s wonderfully familiar maleness.

‘Leo!’ Jodi whispered his name weakly, her voice shot through with the rainbow colours of what she was feeling.

‘How could you possibly believe that I don’t love you?’ she heard him demanding thickly. ‘I’m mad about you! Crazily, insanely, irredeemably and forever in love with you. I thought you were the one who didn’t love me. But then they do say that pregnancy affects a woman’s ability to reason logically...’

‘Leo!’ Jodi protested, her voice even weaker. She couldn’t take in what was happening and, even more importantly, had no idea how it had come about. ‘How? What?’ she began, but Leo was in no mood to answer questions.

His lips were feathering distracting little kisses all along her jaw, her throat, her neck. He was whispering words of love and praise in her ear; he was smoothing a tender hand over the still flat plane of her belly, whilst his voice thickened openly with emotion as he whispered to her, ‘How could you think I didn’t want our child, Jodi?’

She tried to answer him but the seeking urgency of his mouth on hers prevented her, and, anyway, what did questions, words matter when there was this, and Leo, and the wonderful private world of tender loving they were creating between them?

‘The first time we met you stole your way into my bed and my heart,’ Leo said to her as he touched her with gentle, adoring hands, the true extent of his passion only burning through when he kissed her mouth. ‘And there hasn’t been a single day, a single hour since then when I haven’t ached for you, longed for you,’ he groaned. ‘Not a single minute when my love for you hasn’t tormented and tortured me!’

Jodi could see as well as feel the tension pulsing through his nerve-endings as he reined in his sensual hunger for her.

‘Now it’s my turn,’ he told her. ‘Thanks to Nigel, I have stolen my way into your bed, and I warn you, Jodi, I do not intend to leave it until I have stolen my way into your heart as well, and heard from your own lips that you intend to let me stay there, in your heart, in your life and the life of our child—for ever!’

‘For ever,’ Jodi whispered back in wonder as she touched the damp stains on his face that betrayed the intensity of his emotions.

‘I might have thought that loving you was torture,’ Leo told her rawly, ‘but now I know that real torture would be to lose you. Do you know what it was like finding you in my bed, having you reach out and touch me, love me?’ Leo was groaning achingly. ‘Shall I show you?’

Hadn’t her mother always warned her against the danger of playing with fire?

Right now, did she care?

‘Show me!’ she encouraged him boldly.

She could hear the maleness in his voice as well as feel it in his body as he told her triumphantly, ‘Right.’

They made love softly and gently, aware of and awed by their role as new parents-to-be, and then fiercely and passionately as they claimed for themselves the right to be lovers for themselves.

They made love in all the ways Jodi had dreamed in her most private and secret thoughts—and then in some ways she had never imagined.

And then, as it started to become light, after Leo had told her over and over how much he loved her, how much he loved both of them, and insisted that she tell him that she returned his feelings, Jodi demanded, ‘Explain to me what has happened... How...?’ She stopped and shook her head in mute bewilderment. ‘It’s almost as though a fairy godmother has waved her wand and...’

Propping himself up one elbow, Leo looked tenderly down at her.

‘That was no fairy godmother,’ he quipped ruefully. ‘That was my mother!’

‘What?’ Jodi sat bolt upright in bed, taking the duvet with her, only momentarily diverted by the magnificent sight of Leo’s naked body. Long enough, though, to heave a blissful sigh of pleasure and run her fingertip lazily down the length of him, before finally playfully teasing it through the silky thickness of his body hair whilst watching with awed fascination as his body showed an unexpectedly vigorous response to her attentions.

‘Don’t go there,’ Leo warned her humorously. ‘Not unless you mean it.’

Hastily removing her hand, Jodi insisted, ‘I want to hear what’s been going on.’

Leo heaved a sigh of mock-disappointment.

‘My mother flew over from Italy to see me. She’d heard about our engagement from my new secretary and not unnaturally, I suppose, given the nature of mothers, she decided that she wanted to meet my fiancée—the girl who had answered her prayers and those of the village wise woman, whose skills she had commissioned on my behalf. No, don’t ask, not yet,’ he warned Jodi, shaking his head.

‘She wanted to know all about you, and I naturally obliged—well, up to a point. I told her that I’d fallen totally and completely in love with you,’ he admitted to Jodi, his voice and demeanour suddenly wholly serious. ‘And I told her too that you did not return my feelings. As you know, I had to go to London on business, so I invited her to go with me but she refused. She said she preferred to stay where she was until she was due to take up her return flight. I had my suspicions then, knowing her as I do, and so I made her promise that she would not under any circumstances attempt to seek you out—and she promised me that she wouldn’t, but it seems from what she has told me that fate intervened.

‘She had gone for a walk in the village, when, as she put it, she saw a young woman in distress. Naturally she wanted to help, so she sat down beside you and—’

‘That was your mother?’ Jodi interrupted. Now she began to understand!

‘I felt that there was something familiar about her,’ she admitted, ‘but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

‘Mmm.’ She smiled lovingly as Leo broke off from his explanations to kiss her with slow thoroughness. ‘Mmm...’ she repeated. ‘Go on.’

‘With what?’ Leo teased her. ‘The kisses or the explanation?’

‘Both!’ Jodi answered him promptly.

‘But the rest of the explanation first, please, otherwise...’

Laughing, Leo continued, ‘Just as soon as she had left you she rang me in London, demanding to know what on earth I had said to you to give you the impression that I wouldn’t want our child! Jodi...’ Gravely Leo looked at her, his eyes dark with pain. ‘How could you have thought that I...?’

‘You said something would have to be arranged,’ Jodi defended herself firmly.

‘Yes, but the arrangement I had in mind was not a visit to—’ He broke off, so patently unable to even say the words that Jodi instinctively wrapped her arms tightly around him, as filled with a desire to protect him as she had been to protect their unborn child.

‘The place I had in mind for you to visit was a church so that we could be married,’ Leo told her hoarsely. ‘That was what I was talking about. Even if I had not loved you I could never, would never... Thank heavens my mother knows me better than you seem to! Still, at least that puts us on an equal footing now. I originally misjudged you and now you have misjudged me, and, that being the case, I suggest that we draw a line beneath it and start again.’

He took a deep breath. ‘I love you, Jodi Marsh, and I want to marry you.’

Jodi began to smile.

‘I love you too, Leo Jefferson,’ she responded, ‘and I want to marry you...’

‘Now, getting back to the matter of those kisses...’ Leo told her wickedly as he drew her back down against his body, and rolled her gently beneath him.

* * *

Several hours later, Jodi smiled a very special smile to herself. ‘And so Nigel left his key for you to find under the flowerpot by the front door?’ she questioned Leo as she licked the jam from her toast off her fingers and looked across the bedroom at him as he walked out of the bathroom, freshly showered, smiling as he watched her eating her toast hungrily.

‘Yes; he took a considerable amount of persuading, though, and he was terrified that you might suspect that something was going on.’

‘I probably would have done if I hadn’t been so tired,’ Jodi admitted.

Watching her, Leo could feel his love for her filling him. It had been a tremendous risk, short-circuiting things by installing himself in her bed, but thankfully it had worked, allowing them to talk openly and honestly to one another.

As Jodi finished her late breakfast he reached for her again, drawing her towards him, burying his face against her body before wrapping his arms around her and kissing her tenderly.

When his mobile rang he cursed and reached for it, starting to switch it off and then stopping as he murmured to Jodi, ‘It’s my mother.’

‘Hello, Mamma.’ He answered the call and from where she was standing Jodi could hear his mother quite plainly, ‘Leonardo, it is not you I wish to speak to but my daughter-in-law-to-be, your delightful Jodi. You have had her to yourself for quite long enough. Put her on the phone to me this minute, if you please, whilst I tell her about this wonderful shop for all things
bambino
in Milan.’