Ellie thought of the prim and proper clothes she had dragged along with her.
She breathed a sigh of relief that she’d had the chance to blow some of her money on a couple of things that would make a better impression in the casual tropical setting she had not given sufficient thought to when she had flung open the doors of her wardrobe in London. For three years, surrounded by her brainy, wild and wacky colleagues, she had stuck rigidly to the background persona she had molded herself into. Years of anxiety, years of looking after her mother, years of sublimating her own grief in the face of bigger concerns, had conferred a serious maturity on young shoulders.
Here, though...under these hot, turquoise skies and velvet, starry nights, she would stop being that careful young woman, risk averse and taking no chances.
So her boss thought she was Little Miss Efficient and Ever So Slightly Dull?
Well, wouldn’t it give her a kick to prove to James that there was a bit more to her than knee-length skirts and sensible shoes...
Secrets of the Stowe Family
Their next destination? True love!
When Max, Izzy and James’s parents died in a tragic accident, all they had left was each other... Max, the oldest Stowe sibling, had to take charge, bring up his brother and sister—and take the helm of the family business.
Years later, their family business has been transformed into a global success! Still, there’s more to life than just work, isn’t there? It’s time for the Stowe siblings to discover, as they travel the world, the business of love!
Meet the Stowe family in...
Max and Mia’s story
Forbidden Hawaiian Nights
Izzy and Gabriel’s story
Promoted to the Italian’s Fiancée
James and Ellie’s story
Claiming His Cinderella Secretary
All available now!
Cathy Williams
Claiming His Cinderella Secretary
Cathy Williams can remember reading Harlequin books as a teenager, and now that she is writing them, she remains an avid fan. For her, there is nothing like creating romantic stories and engaging plots, and each and every book is a new adventure. Cathy lives in London, and her three daughters—Charlotte, Olivia and Emma—have always been, and continue to be, the greatest inspirations in her life.
Books by Cathy Williams
Harlequin Presents
The Tycoon’s Ultimate Conquest
Contracted for the Spaniard’s Heir
Marriage Bargain with His Innocent
The Italian’s Christmas Proposition
His Secretary’s Nine-Month Notice
The Forbidden Cabrera Brother
Conveniently Wed!
Shock Marriage for the Powerful Spaniard
Once Upon a Temptation
Expecting His Billion-Dollar Scandal
Secrets of the Stowe Family
Forbidden Hawaiian Nights
Promoted to the Italian’s Fiancée
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EXCERPT FROM THE ITALIAN’S DOORSTEP SURPRISE BY JENNIE LUCAS
CHAPTER ONE
WHERE IN GOD’S name was she?
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, slammed risked 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 weir
d 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 ‘debating rooms’, 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...?’
‘Trish did mention that there was something of...er...an incident with...your girlfriend,’ Ellie admitted.
‘An incident?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ Ellie said diplomatically in an attempt to divert her boss from the looming onslaught of thunderous rage.
Darling of the gossip pages as he was, and photographed on practically a weekly basis with one of his women glued to his side, he was fiercely protective of his space in the office. Girlfriends were not allowed within the hallowed walls of the converted factory in Shoreditch which housed some of the sharpest computer brains in the country, and their counterparts with business acumen.
Ellie shuddered to think of the reception Naomi would have had, and knew the ensuing drama would have made his blood boil.
His staff all knew that he was a guy who didn’t believe in longevity when it came to relationships with women. Although nearly every member of staff felt free to quiz him about whatever latest hot model happened to be gracing his bed, he was actually remarkably tight-lipped when it came to discussing his private life. He threw out just enough by way of answers to satisfy curiosity, but who really knew what motivated a man who seemed so averse to settling down?
Ellie, who never asked questions, wondered whether she was the only one to notice that reticence—the way he never really shared anything meaningful about himself.
Did he do so with anyone?
She realised that she was bursting with curiosity about the blow-up with Naomi but she impatiently put a lid on it. Curiosity about her boss would end up being ruinous for their working relationship, and way too challenging for her peace of mind.
‘The whole thing could have been avoided,’ he growled, ignoring her lack of input with the sweeping nonchalance of someone accustomed to a rapt audience. ‘Naomi should have known better than to show up where I work. I’ve always made it very clear to the women I date that play is one thing, but work is quite another, and the two don’t overlap. Stop staring at that tablet as though it’s going to rescue you from sitting here.’
Ellie looked up. ‘I thought you wanted the business with Neco Systems sorted at the speed of light in case someone else came along and snapped them up. I spent the morning compiling the contract. I thought we could run through it before I emailed it to you.’
‘If you’d been at your desk, you could have escorted her out. Tactfully.’
‘It’s not my job to deal with your girlfriends, and why would I have escorted her out?’
‘Because you know I don’t indulge women here unless they work for me.’
Ellie gave up on any prospect of her tablet rescuing her from a conversation she both did and didn’t want to have. Somehow indulging in any kind of personal conversation with her boss felt all wrong. It almost felt threatening. But what really scared her was the element of excitement that went hand in hand with that. He was so clever, so restless, so intrinsically edge-of-seat, addictively commanding.
Part of her wondered what would happen if she allowed herself to be sucked into the vortex of his overpowering personality but somewhere deep inside she had always known that nothing good would come of it.
She didn’t want to talk about his women. She wanted to keep things strictly on a polite, harmonious surface level. She didn’t want anything confusing to disrupt the calm surface of her life. She’d spent far too many years dealing with chaos and confusion in her own personal life to court yet more of it from another source. She knew that, when it came to James, it would be very easy for the lines between boss and secretary to blur at the edges.
He wouldn’t notice, but she would.
She enjoyed and needed this job. She certainly needed the money and she wasn’t about to jeopardise any of that by crossing her own self-imposed boundaries.
‘Perhaps you didn’t make that clear enough,’ Ellie said vaguely.
Naomi had been on the scene for nearly five months, which was something of a record for him. Maybe the poor woman thought that that had constituted the sort of commitment most women sought in a relationship, and therefore that showing up at his workplace wouldn’t have resulted in the Spanish Inquisition.
‘Of course I made it crystal-clear.’ He looked at her with incredulity, as though she’d suddenly started speaking a foreign language, and she returned his gaze coolly, as always. ‘Say what you’re thinking, Ellie. I can see the cogs whirring, so why don’t you spit it out instead of sitting there in fulminating silence?’
Ellie gave up. He could be volatile...energetic in a way that left most people feeling that they were stuck in the slow lane even though they were going as fast as they could. And there were times when she’d had to fade into the background when he had blown a fuse at some hapless person’s incompetence.
That said, his moods had always swept past her, leaving her unscathed. He tiptoed around her, respecting the lines between them, and she suspected that, after a string of unsatisfactory secretaries before her, he did his utmost to protect their working relationship. He had curbed his inclination to engage her in discussing her private life. His natural tendency to be provocative and push the barriers had taken a back seat in the face of her quiet resistance.
By nature, Ellie was reserved. It was ironic that she had managed to find herself working in an environment that nurtured exuberance. When it came to recruitment James had chosen carefully, compiling a team of thirty-strong employees who would all coalesce perfectly. Nerdy, yet confident, cutting-edge-clever and not afraid of waging a war to be heard, competitive, yet smart enough to know when to back down. And, of course, however rowdy they became they were all intensely loyal to their brilliant leader. Since she’d been working there, not a single one had come close to quitting.
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