It wasn’t as though he could argue with me really. What was he going to do, steal my laptop, cut off my hand to get the fingerprint and wade through the dozens of weirdly named drafts until he found something he could publish? I gulped and tightened my grip on the bag. Judging by the scowl on his face that was a possibility.
‘You’re sure that’s enough time with the big party this weekend?’ he asked, picking up his beer and wiping the sweaty bottle across his generous forehead.
‘More than,’ I confirmed. ‘As long as you’re sure you aren’t going to feel strangely compelled to tell Mum and Dad about my secret identity.’
Malcolm leaned across the table and lowered his voice.
‘Sophie Taylor, I have kept more publishing secrets than you’ve had hot dinners and I will take them all to the grave. Did I ever tell you about the time Kazuo Ishiguro and I ended up on a ferry to the Isle of Man after the British Book Awards?’
‘No,’ I whispered, eyes wide open.
‘And I never will,’ he replied sternly. ‘Your secret issafe with me. If I can keep quiet about the author who has to have a baby bottle full of warm milk brought to his room every night on tour for more than twenty years, I think I can get through your dad’s birthday party without spilling the beans.’
‘One day I am going to get you so drunk and you’re going to tell me everything,’ I threatened as he finished his beer then laughed.
‘Please, you forget who you’re talking to. I remember when publishing was still a three-martini lunch game. I could put away enough whisky to down an elephant and I still wouldn’t utter a word,’ he said with a wink. ‘But if you go onGood Morning America, I’ll tell you everything.’
You couldn’t blame a man for trying.
‘Thank you so much but I couldn’t eat another thing,’ I said, ignoring my groaning stomach and immediately reaching for my spoon when the waiter put two bowls of kulfi down on the table. ‘And I don’t think we ordered them?’
‘They were sent by the gentleman over in the corner.’
He discreetly inclined his head towards the far left side of the room and, as I leaned all the way out of my chair, I saw the shadowy shape of a man raising a beer bottle in my direction.
‘But I don’t know the gentleman over in the corner,’ I said, puzzled.
‘I do,’ Malcolm said in a voice that was not promising. ‘Bloody hell.’
The silhouette stood and the first thing I saw was an electric smile light up the darkness.
‘Joe bloody Walsh, our new senior creative director.’Mal plucked his napkin from his lap and threw it over my book. ‘He does your covers. Bloody genius when it comes to books but, in the words of my dearly departed grandmother, he’s both a cad and a bounder, so keep your wits about you. Half the girls in the office are under his spell and I’d say a fair number of the men as well.’
It was very easy to see how Joe Walsh qualified as a cad, a bounder and the official MullinsParker office heartbreaker. When he stepped into the sunlight, I almost gasped out loud. The man looked like something off the cover of a romance novel and not one of the modern ones with the cute illustrations that were, according to some very angry people in my DMs, seriously misleading about the content inside. Oh no. This man belonged on a proper, old-school romance novel, something overtly sexy with ‘rogue’ in the title. Or duke. Or pirate. He’d make an excellent pirate. Dark, dishevelled hair, square jaw, broad shoulders, the sleeves of his white button-down shirt rolled up to the elbow, revealing strong, muscular forearms, and all of it set off by piercing blue eyes that seemed to see through my dress and directly into my soul. If he was one of the characters in my book, I’d have described him as rugged but sensual, unbelievably handsome with an edge of mischief in his eyes and every movement bursting with barely restrained sexuality.
Joe Walsh was the man of every romance reader’s dreams.
‘Don’t you worry about me,’ I told Mal as the cover model approached, my sex most assuredly not on fire and nary a single millimetre of my skin aflame. I was impervious to good-looking book boys with badattitudes, one was enough to last a lifetime. ‘I’m cad-proof and bounder-resistant.’
‘That’s what they all say, Sophie,’ he muttered back. ‘That’s what they all say.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘So this is where you’re hiding.’
Without asking permission from one of the waiters, Joe Walsh dragged a chair away from another table and pulled it up to ours, seat facing outwards. He straddled it confidently, arms crossed and resting on the high back like the cool substitute teacher in a bad nineties movie about a tough inner-city high school. He had the costume down, tie already loosened, shirt rumpled and unbuttoned at the throat, and on anyone else his brown corduroys would have screamed ‘double geography’ but the way they strained against his thick thighs suggested he spent less time studying boulders and more time casually picking them up and throwing them around.
‘What are you doing here?’ Mal asked sharply.
My head flicked back towards my godfather. I couldn’t think of another time I’d known him to be so agitated, not even when he babysat my little sister and she filled his shoes with used cat litter because he refused to sit throughTwilightfor a third time in seven hours.
‘Best chicken dhansak in London,’ Joe replied, hisunabashed eyes still on me. I glared back but he didn’t look away, unbothered by our silent exchange.
‘We missed you at cover art,’ he said to Mal, picking up a teaspoon and helping himself to my kulfi. He closed his eyes and moaned in soft ecstasy, pulling the spoon slowly out from between his full lips. ‘Clearly you were busy.’
‘Joe Walsh, this is my goddaughter, Sophie Taylor,’ Mal said by way of explanation. ‘Sophie, this is someone I work with who wishes he could join us for a cup of tea but sadly can’t because he’s far too busy.’
Joe laughed, a deep, mellifluous sound that went straight to the ovaries.
