The Party Starts at Midnight. Lucy King

he echoed with a faint frown, as if it was taking considerable effort to assimilate the information, which maybe it was because his head was clearly a mess. But, ooh, she didn’t like the way he emphasised the ‘my’, whether he’d meant it that way or not.

      ‘Yours and Jake’s,’ she clarified, then added in a tone so chilly it could have frozen the Sahara, ‘And just in case we’re still not clear, the event I’ve organised for this evening is your Christmas-slash-ten-year-anniversary party taking place right now downstairs. The party you’re meant to be at. Thanking your staff for all their hard work this year, celebrating your success, and generally being around looking full of festive cheer.’ Instead of being upstairs, unconscious as the result of a drinking spree and then flinging potentially slanderous allegations about the place.

      His jaw tightened, his dark eyes narrowed and she thought that she’d never seen anyone less full of festive cheer, but that wasn’t her problem.

      ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

      ‘Seven.’

      He swore and raked his hands through his hair and she kept her eyes firmly on his face, not lowering them to watch the play of muscles and the stretch of his chest caused by the gesture for even a second. ‘I overslept,’ he muttered with a frown.

      If that was the way he wanted to put it, she thought, swallowing hard and locking her knees because she might have peeked just for a moment and she might be feeling a bit faint, then that was up to him. If he thought it all right to drink himself into oblivion and shirk his responsibilities, then fine. ‘Apparently so.’

      ‘Long night,’ he said with a faint apologetic smile that didn’t mollify her in the slightest. ‘And an even longer day. On top of some pretty hideous jet lag.’

      ‘None of my business,’ she said, as interested in his excuses as much as she was interested in why he hadn’t had a woman in his bed for years. Which was absolutely not at all. ‘What is my business is that dinner’s in half an hour and people are wondering where you are, which is why Jake sent me to look for you.’

      He nodded and rubbed a hand along his jaw. ‘I see.’

      ‘Do you?’ she asked a bit archly because there seemed to be an awful lot he hadn’t seen in the last ten minutes, such as the clipboard, which surely marked her out as anything other than a lady of the night and to which she was now clinging as if it were a reminder to keep a grip on the self-control that was badly in danger of unravelling. ‘Really? Well, that’s great. And now I have found you, I’ll be going.’

      She shot him a quick, professional smile and then turned on her heel because she really had to get out of there before she either said or, worse, did something she’d regret, only to jerk to a halt when he said, ‘Wait.’

      ‘What?’ she said, swivelling round and seeing his smile deepen and turn into something so unexpected, so lethally attractive, that she went all hot and dizzy and once again forgot that she was anything other than a woman badly in need of kissing.

      ‘I believe I owe you an apology.’

      She blinked, totally thrown by the switch in his demean-our and the change to his features, but somehow managed to keep that smile fixed to her face. ‘Accepted.’

      ‘I was out of order. Not thinking straight. Half asleep.’

      ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Forget it. I have. Now if you’ll excuse me, I ought to be getting back to the party, so I’ll tell Jake you’ll be down in, what, ten minutes?’

      Leo ran a hand through his hair and then grimaced, his smile turning from lethal to wry, although no less devastating for it, and Abby steeled herself against its effect before taking a hasty step back towards the door, towards escape.

      ‘As for some reason I appear to smell like a distillery,’ he said dryly, ‘you’d better make it twenty.’

      Twenty minutes might have been long enough to wash away the foul smell of stale whisky and douse the heat and desire that Abby had unexpectedly conjured up in him, but it wasn’t nearly long enough to figure out what the hell had been going on with him back there in his bedroom.

      Tugging his cuffs out from beneath the sleeves of his jacket, Leo set his jaw and strode into the lift, the excruciating details of the last half an hour or so slamming into his head all over again.

      Had he really accused her of basically being a prostitute? Had he really thought Jake would organise something like that? And had he really not only eyed her up but actually, for the briefest, maddest moment while overwhelmed by inexplicable lust, seriously considered taking her up on an offer that wasn’t even on the table?

      What was the matter with him?

      Feeling strangely short of breath in a way that had nothing to do with the faster-than-lightning descent of the lift, Leo ran a finger around the inside of his collar to ease it and wished he could wipe the whole mortifying scene from his brain.

      There were faintly mitigating circumstances, it was true. His brain had been fogged up with sleep and he’d been disorientated. In something of a state of shock and very confused. And then there was the fact that he was absolutely exhausted as a result of work, travel and the time of the year, which always gave him sleepless nights and set him on edge.

      But was any of that an excuse? No, it wasn’t. If he’d been thinking clearly he’d have waited for her to explain, would have given her at least the nanosecond of a chance before rushing in with his ridiculous assumptions. He’d have clocked the clipboard earlier and probably come to a very different conclusion.

      He’d certainly have kept his mouth shut. Silence was an excellent and effective weapon, he knew that, and if only his brain hadn’t been completely addled he wouldn’t have dug himself into a hole so deep that, despite her apparent acceptance of his apology, he wasn’t sure he’d got out of it.

      But then he hadn’t been thinking clearly. Or rationally. He hadn’t been thinking at all. At least not with his head. For the majority of their encounter he’d been thinking with a different part of his anatomy entirely.

      At the image of Abby standing there, beautiful blue eyes flashing while she set him straight, magnificent in her indignation and her efforts to hide it, a wave of heat surged through him, making his pulse spike and, to his frustration, his body harden.

      Ruthlessly deleting the image, Leo reminded himself of the ice-cold shower he’d just taken, and as the lift doors opened and he stepped out he decided to delete the rest of the episode up there in his bedroom too, because how the hell was he supposed to get through this evening if he kept remembering how much he’d wanted to take her to bed?

      Doing up the button of his dinner jacket, he strode in the direction of the venue for tonight’s celebrations, searching for the clarity of thought and steely self-control he’d always taken for granted and just about finding it.

      There was nothing he could do to undo what had happened, he reasoned, but with any luck his and Abby’s paths wouldn’t cross again. She’d be working and he’d be doing the thanking of his staff and attempting—though probably failing—to dispense the festive cheer she’d mentioned. Once the evening was over he’d never have to think of her or his fifteen minutes of complete mental meltdown ever again.

      Taking a certain amount of comfort from that, Leo felt the churning in his stomach subside and the mess in his head dissolve, and walked through the double doors that led into the room that was being used to serve drinks and canapés.

      Inwardly wincing at the noise level—which had to be ten times anything he’d ever encountered on a building site—he accepted a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter, and set about draining it in the hope it might obliterate the memory of that humiliating half an hour in his bedroom.

      ‘Good of you to make it,’ came a dry, amused voice from his left that had him jolting mid-swallow and nearly choking on the champagne.

      ‘Thanks for that,’ said Leo, once