‘I hope this isn’t the sound of you thinking that I’m the sort of guy to be seduced by family peer pressure...’
His voice was still teasing but there was an undercurrent of coolness running through it that set off a warning bell in Ellie’s head.
‘I hope you’re not,’ she returned swiftly, and she felt his sidelong glance, although he didn’t break stride.
‘Intriguing remark. Want to expand?’
Ellie felt the hot tingle of perspiration on her face. This was a forceful reminder of the limits of what they had, and he was reminding her that that was something she would do well not to forget.
Pride stiffened her. The last thing she needed was for him to get the idea that she was somehow morphing into one of those women who ended up hanging onto his every word, weeping, wailing and falling apart when he decided that it was time to move on.
He laid down parameters. Well, she, for one, would be following them!
‘You don’t have to worry that I would ever get the wrong idea about...this...’ she said, with an equal amount of coolness in her voice. ‘I won’t. What we have stays here, and that suits me very well, not just because anything else would interfere with my working relationship with you but because you’re the last kind of guy I would go for. In fact, I would say that you’ve done me a favour...’
‘How so?’
‘You’ve reminded me that I’m still young,’ Ellie told him, and that was the truth. ‘That there are guys out there, and that falling in love is still something that is waiting for me. You’ve given me back my confidence.’
‘I’m very glad to be of service,’ James murmured.
Everything she had just said should be exactly what he wanted to hear because it all made sense.
For a second, when she’d hinted that he might be inclined to follow in his siblings’ footsteps, he had thought she might be dropping hints.
Nothing had given him any suspicion that she might be following in Naomi’s footsteps, tempted to barge past the Keep Out signs, refusing to give up even after the door had been slammed shut, but could he be sure? She remained as professional as she always was when they were in the company of their business partners, even fractionally moving off if he got too close.
To his surprise, he found her evasive measures irritating. He had perversely wanted to touch her, to remind their potential business partners that she was his. He hadn’t. Possessiveness was something he personally had no time for as a trait and, if fleetingly he had wanted to stake his claim, then that had to do with a perfectly gentlemanly desire to protect her from any developing situations she might not have been able to handle. The guys were exuberant and open in their appreciation of what they saw.
Good job the deal was practically done.
A few more days here and they would go their separate ways and, when they next met, normality would once again be resumed.
It was exactly what he wanted, and the fact that she had reassured him that she wasn’t about to get any ideas about where this was going should have made him feel better than it did.
Disgruntled, he wondered whether it would be appropriate to point out that not many men liked seeing themselves as a trial run for other guys!
That was the only reason her remarks had made him feel edgy. Truth was, he had timelines when it came to women, and she was no different, even though she might have known him better than most. Possibly better than anyone else did. Inevitable, given that she worked for him and saw him more than most men saw their wives.
What they had would run its course. Every involvement with every woman always ran its course in the end. It was the way he liked it. Nothing deep and so no messy, painful aftermath. So why the hell was he ever so slightly irked at what she’d just said?
He dropped her hand and moved a little away, creating necessary distance between them, searching for his self-control, wondering whether the sun and forty minutes worth of swimming in open ocean had done something to him—made him a bit light-headed, made him think that she’d got under his skin a little too much for his liking.
‘I’ve completed the last bits of paperwork for the deal here.’ Ellie noted the way he had stopped holding hands and stepped just fractionally away.
Did he think that he had to further remind her that this meant nothing to him but a bit of fun?
Had she somehow communicated something to him...done something to make him think otherwise...?
Anxiously, Ellie tried to think back. The mere fact that she felt she might have somehow signalled to him that she was in deeper than she’d ever expected, despite the very sensible mantras she kept repeating to herself, sent a chill of apprehension racing up and down her spine.
Bring it back to work...
In the thick, suddenly uncomfortable silence, she chatted about everything she had managed to get through earlier while he had been in front of his laptop. Legal technicalities had been ironed out! Patents sorted! Signatures were awaited but she didn’t foresee any problems...
Eventually, her voice tapered off and she stared straight ahead. For the first time she was blind to the exotic beauty of their surroundings, to the hum of distant insects, the sound of the lapping ocean, the stunning riot of colour of all the flowers, the people and the infectious sound of laughter.
She felt the loss of his touch like a physical blow, and that scared her, making her doubly determined to keep her feelings under wraps.
Their dedicated chauffeur was waiting to take them back to the hotel. She slid into the back seat and closed her eyes for a few seconds, enjoying the cool air-conditioning after the scorching heat outside.
What was going on? Was this the prelude to the goodbye speech? Only now that it was imminent did she realise how much she had been looking forward to really enjoying the last few days with him.
Did that make her seem clingy? The very thought was mortifying. She thought of poor Naomi and felt a twinge of intense sympathy.
She clasped her hands together on her lap and stared through the tinted windows, wondering what line of conversation to take to break the increasingly uncomfortable silence between them.
‘You’ve gone quiet on me,’ James murmured. Ellie slid her gaze across and breathed a mental sigh of relief because the sudden coolness between them had filled her with horror, disproportionately so.
‘Have I? I thought I’d been talking quite a bit about closing this deal we’ve come here to do.’
‘Less work and more play...’
‘If you say so...you’re the boss, after all...’ He tugged gently and she shuffled closer to him. He closed the privacy partition, separating them from their driver, and tilted her face to his.
‘I am,’ he agreed, tracking the outline of her mouth with his finger and sending a thousand little electrical impulses reverberating through her body. ‘I’ve spent the whole day wanting to touch you. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that we’ll be at the hotel in under twenty minutes, I would be doing a lot more than I’m doing now...’
‘Really?’ Ellie queried huskily. ‘Like what?’
‘I’d quite like to pay some attention to your breasts... Have I mentioned that you have beautiful ones?’
‘James, stop!’ But she was laughing as her whole body went up in flames at his evocative words and the searing hunger in his dark eyes.
‘Tell me I’m not turning you on...’
‘Maybe you are.’
‘Just maybe? Maybe you’ll get a little more turned on if I tell you that I’m looking forward to taking that bikini off you very, very slowly and then, once I’ve devoted sufficient attention to your breasts, I intend to get between your legs and taste you down there until you’re begging me not to stop...’
‘Shh...’
‘Are you wet for me yet?’
‘You know I am.’
‘Would you like to
come against my mouth? I know you enjoy that...’
‘Not as much as I enjoy feeling you inside me.’ Looking at herself from a distance, looking at the woman now saying what she had just said, Ellie could scarcely believe her ears. She had never thought she could be so uninhibited and she had to acknowledge that that had been his great gift to her.
She had opened up with him, against all odds, and she had blossomed in ways she could never have imagined.
She was in such desperate need of being touched, after that hot conversation in the back of the car, that she practically leapt out of her seat before the driver had had a chance to pull to a stop.
And James was in as much of a hurry as she was.
They were holding hands, and neither of them had expected to be greeted by a woman. Indeed, they barely realised that they were on a collision course with the towering blonde until she was suddenly there, right in front of them, her expression more shock than fury.
James gathered himself at speed and stood back, expression closed, concealing his shock as he looked at his ex for a few stunned seconds.
‘Naomi. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I came...to see whether we could patch things up. I know you never answered my texts but... I know how proud you are...’ She was talking to James. She was staring at Ellie. Her cool, assessing eyes glittered as hard as diamonds.
‘I told you it was over.’ His voice was tight and controlled.
He had managed to pull them all to one side. Ellie was hardly aware of being manoeuvred out of the main stream of traffic along with Naomi, who was wearing the briefest of shorts, the tiniest of cropped tops and carrying a holdall bearing a well-known logo.
‘So what’s going on between the two of you?’
Her voice had risen. Ellie could feel curious eyes on them. Hardly surprising, given the fact that Naomi was clearly a supermodel, James was clearly incredibly important and incredibly wealthy and the altercation between them was clearly going south.
A cabaret of sorts was about to commence and who wouldn’t be interested in taking a ringside to witness the event?
She thought of Naomi kicking off at the office in her absence and wondered whether a repeat performance was on the cards, this time with a far more judgemental audience.
‘This was supposed to be our holiday, James! I even chose this hotel!’
‘I am not going to get into this with you again, Naomi. This was not a trip for you to make. I don’t want a scene in a public place but I’m warning you—if you don’t leave, I’ll have no option but to call the manager to have you discreetly escorted out of the hotel.’
‘You can’t do that! This is a public place! Besides, you wouldn’t dare risk a scene!’
‘Want to try me?’
‘Were you involved with your little secretary before we broke up, James?’
Everything in Ellie wanted to rage against the sweeping insult behind that accusation, but tact made her hold back the words begging to be delivered.
She was on the periphery of this, and besides, whatever the rights or wrongs of Naomi showing up on the island in the hope that her physical charms might achieve what texts and phone calls presumably hadn’t, Ellie felt a twinge of sympathy for the other woman.
She was uneasily aware of just how effortlessly you could get blinded to the reality of a situation. James was just so persuasive, so charming, so incredibly dynamic, sharp, clever and unexpectedly thoughtful in ways you could never have predicted.
Just as well she knew the parameters of this game being played, but even so...
Naomi had wanted more. Without those parameters really in place, was it any wonder she had been tempted to show up here...?
‘Okay. I think I’ve had enough of this.’ He looked around, searching for one of the members of staff.
Ellie stepped in to say quietly, ‘That’s insulting to James and it’s insulting to me, what you’re inferring.’
‘Well, it’s obvious that you two are an item,’ Naomi bit back without hesitating. ‘It’s obvious you’re all loved up. Do you honestly think you’re going to get anywhere with him when I couldn’t?’
Out of the corner of her eye, Ellie could see the worried face of the hotel manager as he scuttled at pace across the marble foyer.
‘You won’t!’ Naomi leaned in to Ellie.
‘You don’t understand...’ Ellie began, distraught at what was happening, and keen to eliminate herself from a scenario in which she didn’t feel she truly belonged.
How dared this perfect stranger think that she, Ellie, was so lacking in principles that she would have hopped into bed with her boss while he was seeing another woman?
Yet, she had hopped into bed with him, hadn’t she? And the time lag between Ellie doing that and him breaking up with the stupendously beautiful blonde looking at her with ice-cold eyes had been shamelessly brief, hadn’t it?
So Naomi had flown over here, desperate to effect a reconciliation...
And Ellie? Was clinging to these last few days just as desperate—even if her desperation was hidden behind a veneer of self-control and nonchalant acceptance of the ground rules laid down?
When she thought of their relationship coming to an end, to returning to London where she would plaster a bright, beaming smile on her face and pretend nothing had happened, there was a feeling of terrifying emptiness underneath all the bracing assumptions that this was something that would fade in no time at all.
How different was she really from the woman who had crossed the Atlantic to reconnect with a guy who no longer wanted her? How vulnerable would she find herself when things resumed between them professionally, with this brief interlude relegated to the history books?
Had anything in her life prepared her for this? No. Too many years living a sheltered life had allowed James, with his larger-than-life personality, to roar through her with the force of an all-consuming tidal wave, battering down the door she had spent so many years keeping firmly shut between them.
Suddenly exposed to thoughts she had managed to wilfully avoid, Ellie felt her heart begin to race.
Low, urgent words were being exchanged between James and Naomi, but it was all just background noise, eclipsed by a weird thundering in her ears and a sickening realisation that she had managed to lose all control over what was happening in her life.
Having been immersed in her thoughts, she resurfaced to Naomi hissing under her breath that she would be sorry.
Sorry for what?
She looked at James in confusion, feeling as though she’d fallen asleep during the middle of a play only to wake up to an ending that made no sense.
‘James may have told you that he’s serious about you, but he’s not. Word to the wise: don’t get your hopes up. There won’t be a wedding ring on that finger any time soon!’
She spun on her heels, sweeping past the hotel manager who had halted in his tracks at some point, no doubt having been given an invisible signal by James. Eyes followed her, avidly curious. One or two phones were recording the whole episode but Ellie had too much on her mind to pay a blind bit of notice to any of that.
Instead, she scrambled behind James as he summoned the lift with a thunderous expression which he couldn’t quite manage to conceal.
As with the snapping smartphones, Ellie ignored the thunderous expression and said bluntly, just as soon as the doors had snapped shut behind them, ‘What did she mean by that?’
‘By what?’
‘Fingers and wedding rings! Did you tell her that we were some kind of item?’
‘It would have been difficult for her to have escaped that conclusion.’
‘No, it would have been very easy to have set her straight!’
The lift doors pinged open and she hurried after him, eager to have the privacy of a room with no chance of wagging ears or eyes on st
alks.
‘We were holding hands when we entered the lobby,’ he reminded her with a level of calm that got on her nerves. ‘You were flushed with wanting me. We couldn’t wait to get back to the bedroom. A fool with poor eyesight would have been able to put two and two together.’
He was stripping off as he spoke, prowling the elegant sitting area that adjoined the massive bedroom.
All that startling masculine beauty. It had got right to her, demolished her defences, but she refused to allow it to leave her helpless. She wasn’t going to drift along until things fizzled out between them in a few days’ time.
In some way, Naomi’s appearance had put things into miserable perspective, and if she didn’t take hold of the reins now then when would she?
‘So now she thinks that this is serious? Now she thinks that you broke up with her so that you could bring me here to take her place?’
‘Do either of us care what Naomi thinks?’
His eyes were cool, already distant. Ellie wondered whether, down the line, he would care what she thought. No chance. He was impervious to emotion, which was why it was so easy for him to take what he wanted when it came to women and then discard them when they began to bore him.
‘I care,’ Ellie said quietly. ‘I care, James. I’m not like you. I can’t just do whatever I want to do and to heck what other people think.’
He flushed darkly and raked his fingers through his hair. He’d stripped off the shirt, unbuttoning the shorts that hung low on lean hips. She had to look away so that her body didn’t begin misbehaving. With an unconscious gesture of self-defence, she hugged herself and stared at him, not having moved from the door, having remained standing while he had powered into the room.
‘Who says we aren’t an item?’
‘You let her think that this was serious, and it’s not, and I know why you did that. You did it because you wanted to get rid of her and that was the most efficient way of doing it.’
‘She was going to believe what she wanted to believe,’ James countered, but he hadn’t breached the distance between them, and the air shimmered with antagonism.
Claiming His Cinderella Secretary Page 10