‘I think we need to call it day.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Ellie. Isn’t that something of an overreaction? Why? Because an ex huffed and puffed and thought she could blow the house down?’
Because I think I’m falling in love with you.
It was a shattering realisation, one that had crept up and ambushed her when she hadn’t been looking. She should have been looking. Instead, she had been busily telling herself that she couldn’t possibly fall for him because she was too sensible. As if being sensible made her invincible.
She breathed in deeply, taking her time to think, knowing that hysteria on any level just wasn’t going to work.
‘Because I stepped back, had a good, long look at myself and I didn’t like what I saw.’
‘Which was what?’
Which was a complete fool with cotton wool for a brain.
‘I wasn’t raised to have flings. It’s not what I do, and it’s especially horrible to know that someone might actually think I’m the kind of person who doesn’t mind sleeping around with some guy who’s involved with someone else. I was brought up with a lot of principles, and I guess I thought I could dump them for a while, but I was wrong. I can’t. We could carry on with what we have but, now that I’ve come to my senses, it would be hard for me to return to where we were...’
She sighed and looked away. She wished she could read what he was thinking but, for a guy who was apparently so open, he was adept when it came to revealing only what he wanted to reveal. Right now, she had no idea what was going through his head.
‘In that case,’ he said coolly, ‘you’re probably right. I’m not looking for involvement, Ellie. Not me. Never will be.’
A dagger had just shot through her heart but she only had herself to blame. She nodded and managed a smile. ‘I’ll move myself back to my bedroom...’
And what happens next?
He answered that unspoken question without her having to try and find a subtle way of asking it.
‘I anticipate,’ he drawled, ‘that all signatures will be in place tomorrow. There’s no more schmoozing to be done. The deal will have been done. To avoid any potential awkwardness, you are free to arrange a flight back for yourself, and I will see you when I return to London in a couple of weeks.’ He inclined his head to one side and gave her a half mocking salute. ‘That suit you?’
‘Yes.’ Ellie nodded, her face as blank as his. ‘That would be for the best...’
CHAPTER SEVEN
JAMES GAZED OUT from the balcony of his suite at a view that was incomparable.
Sprawled on the hand-made bamboo chair, long legs stretched out on the matching footstool and hands folded behind his head, he let his eyes feast on a tapestry of navy blue sea and a sky that was ablaze with all the vibrant colours of sunset. Russet and burnt orange against a backdrop of deepest indigo and midnight-blue. No painter could have captured the natural beauty.
However, as he nursed a rum, the only persistent image in his head was that of his recently departed personal assistant.
For the first time since they had touched down on the island, his bed was empty. In a fitful sleep, he had rolled onto his side at a little after three in the morning, automatically reaching out for her warmth, but had jerked awake, uncomfortable at the thought that he didn’t care for the sudden emptiness of his sleeping arrangements.
Since when had he had a problem sleeping on his own? Indeed, that was something he had always actively encouraged. It was rare for any woman to occupy his bed overnight, and certainly never for nights on end, as though some kind of habit was being nurtured.
He had been interested to see how breakfast together would go, following what he still considered to be an overly dramatic and premature ending to what they had going on. He’d imagined that he might have to deal with her embarrassment.
Understandable.
She lacked his considerable experience in these matters. In fact, when he thought about her, which he had done for most of the night, it was to conclude that she was strangely innocent and touchingly disingenuous, despite the outward image of a cool, controlled and utterly unflappable professional.
It tickled him pink to think that he was the one-in-a-million guy who had seen right into that very private part of her.
So he had been surprised and a little disgruntled, several hours earlier, when he had sat down to breakfast with a woman who was once again metaphorically dressed in her London work uniform.
Every time he had tried to steer the conversation in a more personal direction, she had blanked over and looked at him with polite, ever so amused grey eyes and then promptly returned the conversation right back to work. Deals that were brewing on the side lines... An email from a company he had casually approached six months previously that was now interested in doing business with him... The sudden absence of one of the CEOs whose mother had been rushed to hospital following a car accident...
She had been thoroughly and admirably in control, and naturally he had been immensely grateful to be spared the awkwardness of having to get things back on track in preparation for a resumption of their normal working relationship.
He had reminded himself of the continuing nightmare of the ex who couldn’t go away. Another lingering ex was the last thing he needed.
Still... Was there any reason for her politely but firmly to decline his suggestion that he accompany her to the airport?
‘Good Lord! That’s very sweet of you but of course I don’t want you coming with me to the airport!’ She had knocked back his offer with incredulous laughter and then followed up by wryly informing him that she was perfectly capable of checking in at an airport, even if it had been ages since she’d had a chance to go abroad before this.
He had gritted his teeth and smiled when she had earnestly thanked him then for the opportunity to visit such a wonderful island. And when he had tilted his head to the side and asked her whether that was all she wanted to thank him for, she hadn’t been in the slightest bit coy.
‘Oh, the sex was lovely,’ she had said warmly, but her eyes had glazed over, and it had been perfectly clear that the lovely sex was something she was already in the process of putting behind her.
Who was he to complain? She’d made it easy for him. She had pulled back from dwelling on the fact that she didn’t do casual, saving him the necessity of gently reminding her that emotional relationships were a beast he steered clear of.
He drained his glass. It was a little after six and he would spend the remainder of the evening working. He’d signed off on the deal he had come to finalise, and in the blink of an eye he would be boarding a plane for Hawaii, no doubt in the mood for some distraction.
Dwelling was a much-overrated pastime. There would be no time to dwell when he was working by day and playing by night. It was a tried and tested formula that had always stood him in good stead. It had worked when his parents had died, and it had worked in the aftermath of his juvenile crush on a woman who had only been good for warming his bed. It would damn well work now.
He stood up, stretched and absently appreciated the rapidly sinking ball of fire disappearing over the horizon. Give it three days and he would probably be hard pressed to remember just how intense the past few days on this island had been...
* * *
Ellie gazed at her mobile phone, which had not stopped ringing for the past eight hours.
The trip back had been uneventful enough, and she had almost managed to convince herself that putting distance between them would work wonders when it came to clearing her head.
She’d fallen hook, line and sinker for her boss, and so of course it was going to be a towering mountain to climb for that brief liaison to be erased from her memory bank, but erased it would be. She had no choice in the matter, at least not until she managed to find another job that paid as well.
She had managed t
o get through the nightmare of their last breakfast together in one piece. Her jaw had ached from the discomfort of the phoney smile she had plastered to her face, but she had got through it, and that was the main thing.
It had been a pointer that overcoming this suffocating misery was achievable.
She landed at Gatwick Airport and took a taxi back to her flat. The idea of trudging on public transport seemed way too depressing and arduous.
She knew that one of the things she would have to become accustomed to was going to be the drudgery of normal life.
She’d always taken great pride in being the sort of person who wasn’t easily impressed by the trappings of wealth. She’d worked with James Stowe and seen first-hand the amount of money he lavished on the women he dated, because she often found the receipts for ludicrously expensive items kicking around on his desk, and had privately smirked at the superficiality of those women who were actually impressed by all that sort of stuff.
And yet, she now found herself swelling their numbers, seduced by the pleasure of all those comforts that went hand in hand with great wealth. She had gazed at the perfect splendour of a pristine beach, dipping into a picnic prepared by a top chef, and she had felt so blissfully happy.
Did that make her superficial? No. Worse than that, she had to acknowledge that she would have felt just as blissfully happy had they been tucking into chicken and chips eaten out of plastic baskets, because James had been the reason for her happiness.
Nevertheless, she would have to come right back down to earth, and fast. And for the first twenty-four hours, she actually believed that that was on the cards. She unpacked, stuffing her newly acquired clothes to the back of her wardrobe, where she anticipated them spending a few years hibernating before she gave them to a charity shop. She could never entertain the notion of wearing all those brightly coloured items of clothing again, not when they would always remind her of a time that had come and gone in the blink of an eye.
Then she had an early night and tried to plan her return to work the following Monday without a broken heart stamped all over her face. The last thing she felt she could deal with was sheepish, embarrassed, inquisitive looks from concerned colleagues.
* * *
Fate had other ideas when it came to giving her a break, and now here she was...
What on earth was she going to do?
The phone had been ringing off the hook. There were two men with cameras outside her house, lounging by a car, smoking and waiting for her to emerge from where she had now been in hiding for the past day.
She felt as if she was suddenly under attack on all sides, and she had no idea what she was going to do.
The first call, from one of her colleagues at work, had alerted her to the fact that she was suddenly in the spotlight and newsworthy.
‘Hey, girl, what’s going on?’
Ellie had heard Trish’s sing-song voice but, before she’d been able to fill her in on the successful outcome of her trip to Barbados, she had been pinned to the spot by a series of good-natured questions that had left her reeling.
The second she had hung up, she had found the tabloid headlines on her phone and had watched her whole life begin to unravel with sickening horror.
Of course, Ellie had known that James was the darling of the tabloid press. A billionaire, ridiculously good-looking, and with the gravitas and money that came from the complex and cut-throat world of business.
He was also courteous towards reporters. He always seemed to recognise that they were doing a job and, as long as they didn’t go anywhere he didn’t want them to go, he was unfailingly co-operative. Hence he graced the covers of magazines and newspapers with predictable regularity because of the transitory nature of his relationships and the high profiles of most of his exes.
But now...
Now she was the woman...the one who had finally ‘snared the country’s most eligible bachelor’... The quiet little secretary who had ‘worked her magic from the side lines’... The one who had ‘managed to get the ring on her finger and the date set for a walk down the aisle’...
Of course, in a week’s time this would all be history, and the reporters would be busily finding someone else to pin to the wall, but for now...
For now, she was trapped in her own house and when she did emerge, which she would have to in the next day or two to return to work, she would have to hope and pray that the furore would have died down.
Usually, Ellie would have taken a deep breath and cheerfully told the lot of them that it was all just a ridiculous mistake. If you ploughed your way through a problem, it was usually the fastest way of dealing with it, but there was now the added complication of her mother.
Every problem seemed to open a door to a new one. She cradled a cup of tea, frantically trying to work out how on earth she was going to deal with the accumulated lot of problems.
Her train of thought was interrupted by the frantic ringing of the doorbell. At six thirty in the evening this was the last thing she wanted and she ignored the piercing summons until her mobile phone began ringing as well, and up popped his number.
James.
Her heart stopped and she sank back against the chair and closed her eyes for a second.
Through all this, she hadn’t stopped thinking of him. Would news of this have reached him in Barbados? He only read the broadsheets, but the gossip grapevine that did the rounds at work would surely have reached him?
She reluctantly took the call and braced herself to be upbeat when all she wanted to do was hide away until the whole mess blew over.
‘Open the door, Ellie!’
‘James...’ Her voice petered off.
‘Open the door! I’m outside.’
‘Outside?’
‘Standing on your doorstep, to be precise.’
‘I don’t want to go outside. There are people there.’ She heard the sound of tears in her voice and cleared her throat.
‘I’ve got rid of them.’
‘You have?’ Relief washed over her, and for the first time in her life she weakly discovered what it felt like to have someone there to have her back and pick up the pieces.
Taking no chances and not stopping to be concerned that she was clad in nothing more than an old tee shirt, a pair of tight leggings and some gaily patterned bedroom slippers, Ellie went to the front door and unlocked it just enough to make sure that he was really there.
He was.
The breath whipped out of her and she stared for a few seconds, drinking him in with such shameless compulsion that she forgot the horror of her current situation.
He was in a pair of dark jeans and a dark polo shirt, with a battered tan bomber jacket hooked over one shoulder. He looked so utterly unfazed that she could only stare, mesmerised.
‘Shouldn’t you be on your way to Hawaii?’
‘Open the door and let me in. I’ve sent the two reporters on their way, but I can’t guarantee they won’t be back, and an argument on the doorstep when we’re due to be married any day soon is going to send them into a feeding frenzy...’
Ellie promptly undid the chain and fell back as he brushed past her into her tiny hallway before spinning round on his heels to look at her.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ he demanded, staring at her.
How could he be so controlled? So calm, beautiful and utterly unruffled?
It didn’t seem fair. She pulled herself up, stiffened her shoulders and glared at him.
‘Call about what?’ she asked with cool defiance.
Frozen to the spot by the laser sharpness of his eyes, it was an effort to unglue herself from her rigid position and head towards the kitchen, making sure to circle round him. She felt his eyes on her back as she walked ahead of him and into the small kitchen with its weathered pine table and mismatched, colourful chairs she had bought from a car boot
sale a few months ago.
Only a handful of days ago, this man had been her lover, but that was then and this was now and Ellie was not going to let him think that she couldn’t cope with what was being thrown at her.
Still...
She was glad that he was here. Somehow, his very presence felt like a guarantee that peace and order would be re-established.
‘Can I get you some coffee?’
‘Can you stop acting as though I’m a stranger? You should have called to tell me that the paparazzi were camping on your doorstep. How long have they been there? Since that bloody article hit the headlines? I’m guessing you’ve been bombarded with phone calls as well. It’s easy for these people to get hold of a mobile number if certain security measures aren’t in place.’
Bombarded with information and swept along by his instant dominance over the situation, Ellie could only subside weakly into one of the chairs, where she proceeded to rest her chin in her hands. She looked at him.
Coffee would have to wait. She felt she needed something a lot stronger. Scotch, maybe. A double. Except, there was none in the house. Her phone buzzed and she looked at it but didn’t pick up.
‘You have my apologies,’ James murmured in a low voice. ‘You look as though you could use a drink, and I don’t blame you. What have you got?’
‘There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge...’ She wanted to be strong and in charge, because they were no longer involved with one another, but it felt so good for him to take charge that she waited and then sighed with barely concealed relief when a glass of wine was placed in front of her.
‘Talk to me.’
‘Why are you here?’ was what came out of her mouth, and he frowned.
‘Did you expect me to read all that nonsense emblazoned across the tabloids and then head off to Hawaii, leaving you to deal with the mess?’
‘I’m not your problem.’
‘Let’s put pride to one side just for the moment,’ James said neutrally. ‘Have you left the house? Spoken to anyone?’
Claiming His Cinderella Secretary Page 11