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  ‘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.’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘AND you still intend to teach at your school?’

  Over her mother-in-law’s head Jodi smiled into Leo’s eyes as Luisa Jefferson cooed ecstatically over the bundle that was her baby grandson.

  It was Leo and Jodi’s wedding anniversary and they had flown out to Italy to stay with Leo’s parents.

  ‘For the time being, but only on a part-time basis,’ Jodi replied.

  All the letters of support she had received from her pupils’ parents had thrilled Jodi, and, as she and Leo had agreed, she owed it to everyone who had supported her to stay on at the school until the right kind of replacement for her had been found.

  ‘After all,’ she had smiled to Leo, ‘our own children will be going there.’

  Leo had bought Ashton House, and Jodi had spent all her free time in the months before baby Nicholas Lorenzo’s birth organising its renovation and redecoration.

  Leo’s parents had flown over to Frampton from Italy for the baby’s birth, and a special extra guest had been invited to the large family christening, much to Leo’s wry amusement and his mother’s open delight.

  ‘Her name is Maria, and she says that she will make a special potion for you to drink that will guarantee the happiness of you and Leonardo and your children,’ Luisa Jefferson had whispered to Jodi when she had introduced her village’s wise woman to her.

  ‘My happiness is already guaranteed,’ Jodi had responded with a shining smile of trust and love in her husband’s direction. ‘Just so long as I have Leo!’

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-4745-5

  THE TYCOON’S VIRGIN

  First North American Publication 2002.

  Copyright © 2002 by Penny Jordan.

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