CHAPTER ONE
WHEREINGOD’Snamewasshe?
James pushed his chair back, swivelled it at an angle so that he could relax back, feet up on his desk, folded his hands behind his head and scowled darkly at his office door, which had been slammed shut just a few minutes ago.
Actually,slammedrisked being an understatement. He was surprised the thing was still on its hinges. Naomi, his now ex-girlfriend, had stormed out of his office, blazingly angry, only just managing to resist the temptation to hurl one of her designer Jimmy Choos at his head.
Her raised voice had been loud enough to shatter glass. Certainly, his entire office must have stopped dead in their tracks. He suspected they might well have downed tools completely so that they could huddle and dissect what they had heard, and doubtless he would be peppered with questions the second he stepped foot out of his office.
There were distinct disadvantages to being a boss with an‘open door, feel free to speak your mind’policy, he decided. A hub filled with young computer geniuses who thrived on the encouragement he gave them to enjoy the informality of his state-of-the-art workspace in order to nurture their creativity had spawned, he glumly thought now, a team of outspoken employees who wouldn’t think twice about a formal inquisition into Naomi’s noisy departure. Who could resist a full-blown gossip-fest about a woman whose parting shot had been that ‘he hadn’t heard the last of this’?
Right now, he needed his cool, level-headed secretary to return some semblance of normality to what remained of the day, but where the heck was she in his hour of need?
Next to him, his mobile phone buzzed. He looked at it, saw it was Naomi, and decided that any further conversations would be futile—although he knew she wasn’t the type to take things lying down. He had no interest in picking up where they had left off. What more could there be to shout about? And neither was he interested in any kind of reconciliation. The relationship was dead in the water and he had to acknowledge that he had sleepwalked his way into that one.
He’d thought what they had was fun. He’d assumed she was on the same page as him. She’d talked about her career as a catwalk model and how it would be the perfect springboard for her to branch out into fashion design. She’d claimed to be a career woman with no time for anything permanent. She had shown him drawings she had done for a collection of casual wear, and hadn’t batted an eyelid when he had accidentally held up the first sketch the wrong way. She’d been the epitome of easy going, so who could have blamed him when he’d casually asked her if she would like to accompany him to his brother’s wedding in Hawaii?
They were to spend a few days in the Caribbean, because he’d wanted to seal a deal with a promising start-up company in Barbados. She had been given free rein to choose whatever five-star hotel she wanted, no expense spared. There would be luxury on tap, she would be able to do as she pleased during the day while he worked and they would have the nights to themselves. Of course, he would only get through the preliminaries. Pinning down the final deal would require his trusty PA, so he would have to conclude business in London, but he would have been able to kick-start the process. Then they were to have a leisurely tour of the various Hawaiian islands before the wedding.
It had all made perfect sense and would have spared him the headache of going to Max’s wedding on his own. Personally, he had nothing against people getting married, even though he’d only just recovered from the shock of his die-hard bachelor brother waxing lyrical about the joys of tying the knot.
As a result of his own experiences, however—and from the experiences of some of his friends, who had flung themselves headlong into wedlock at way too young and tender an age, only to regret the impulse a couple of years down the road—commitment and everything it entailed was a game he had no intention of playing any time soon. Hence the prospect of being the best man and bachelor-in-residence at his brother’s wedding had filled him with a certain amount of dread. He had been to five weddings in the past six years. And, was it his imagination or were all the unattached females at weddings sprinkled with some kind of weird fairy dust that suddenly made them want to fall in love and rush down the aisle? Having Naomi on his arm, he had concluded, would be the speediest route to making sure he wasn’t targeted by anyone with stars in their eyes. Naomi, like him, knew just what relationships were all about. Fun. No strings attached. Just two adults enjoying one another.
Except he’d been wrong.
James snorted at his own idiocy in thinking that she had been as casual about their affair as he had, but was spared the frustration of dwelling further on the hissy fit to which he had just been subjected by one firm knock followed by the soft push of his office door opening.
‘About time.’ He swept his feet off the desk and briskly sat forward as Ellie leaned round to hand him a mug of coffee—strong, sugarless and black. Just the thing he needed. The woman was a mind reader.
‘About time?’
Ellie looked at her charismatic, wildly sexy boss and suppressed the usual shiver of unwelcome awareness that rippled through her every time she saw him.
She’d been working for James Stowe for three years and he still managed to have an annoying effect on her, although she had always been adept at concealing it under a calm, professional exterior. She wasn’t a fool. She knew that an inconvenient attraction was just an annoying blip, easily swatted away, and it was easy enough to swat away because Ellie was sensible enough to conclude that what attracted her was the pull of the opposite. Her stupidly sexy boss was brilliant, utterly unafraid of taking risks and enjoyed the sort of sybaritic, revolving door love life that privately made her shudder. Never mind the more prosaic fact that she’d seen some of the women he dated, and the possibility of him being attracted to her was as far-fetched as a lion being drawn to a mouse.
It was an environment where the dress code was ‘anything goes’,and the excess energy of the young, talented thirty-strong staff was burnt off at the ping pong table, the darts board or in one of the ‘debatingrooms’, where they could exchange their ideas as forcefully as they wanted. But Ellie always dressed in a uniform of sober suits and flats and, whatever energy she wanted to burn off, she did it at the local swimming pool once a week.
Where her boss was stupidly clever and outspoken in a way that sometimes made her feel faint, Ellie was just the opposite, and she privately maintained that that was the reason why they worked so harmoniously together.
‘Where have you been?’
Ellie calmly swerved to sit at the leather chair in front of his desk. She glanced down at her tablet, which she had brought in as she always did, to make notes about whatever mountain of urgent emails he needed her to deal with. When she looked at him, it was to find him glaring at her.
‘To the dentist,’ she said briskly. Disgruntled blue eyes met her calm grey ones and she fought not to flush.
He was so beautiful, it was almost a sin. His hair was chestnut-brown, thick and straight. His features were chiselled to perfection, his nose straight, his mouth full of sensuous, wicked promise. Sometimes in the early hours of the morning, when her thoughts were prone to drifting, an image of him would pop into her head and she would savour the taboo pleasure of thinking about the six-foot-two alpha male with the kind of loose limbed, careless grace that made heads turn.
Of course in the cold light of day such thoughts never intruded, and if they did it was easy to dampen them because any woman in the presence of a guy like him could be excused for feeling a bit tingly now and again.
‘Did you tell me that you weren’t going to be in until...’ he made a show of consulting his Rolex‘...two-thirty in the afternoon?’
‘Of course I did. I also emailed you to remind you a couple of days ago. If you’d like, I can have the email printed off—’
‘Not necessary,’ James growled, waving down the suggestion dismissively. ‘I suppose you’ve heard what’s happened?’ He didn’t wait for her to answer. ‘This office is a hotbed of gossip. It’s impossible to have any kind of private life here! I expect you were grabbed the second you came through that door? Treated to every tiresome detail of the drama that unfolded in your absence? Which, incidentally, would not have happened if you’d been at your desk instead of in a dentist’s chair! How’s the tooth, anyway?’
‘The tooth is fine. Thank you for asking.’
‘So...?’
