No comment had been his catchphrase ever since he had returned to London a day and a half ago.
No comment to the reporters eager to get a scoop. No comment to his employees, who had backed away as soon as they had recognised the warning intent in his eyes should they choose to pursue their curiosity.
Thus far, he had fielded three phone calls from an excitable Izzy, demanding to know what was going on and asking when the big day was going to be, because she would have to start shopping for a hat. He had done his best to quell her ridiculous enthusiasm but for once he was discovering that there were situations in life he could not readily cope with.
He impatiently pushed himself back from the desk and swivelled the chair to stare out of the window. For once, his door was closed. No one dared knock on it. He had been like a bear with a sore head and they all knew better than to disturb him.
Ellie.
He’d texted her. Obviously, that had been perfectly reasonable, because he had to know when ‘no comment’ could morph into ‘things didn’t work out as expected’. Today’s hot-off-the press news would, he knew, be history within days, but still, he needed to know how to play things out, and he had given his word to her that he would wait until she was comfortable telling her mother the truth.
She’d replied to his embarrassingly long-winded text quite simply.
All’s fine here, thanks. Will keep you in the loop. I will tell Mum it’s off by the end of next week.
He’d be in Hawaii by then.
He would be facing curious family members and he would not be able to shut himself inside an office, having pinned a metaphorical Enter at your own risk sign on the door.
He would...
What would he do? Say? Think?
For a few seconds he was swamped by a suffocating sensation of powerlessness. It was like a blanket over him, stifling his ability to think straight. All he could see in his mind’s eye was Ellie, with her smooth, calm face, her intelligent grey eyes and, behind that calm intelligence, all that fiery, sexy passion that had energised him a way he would never have imagined possible.
Walking away had made sense, but for once doing what made sense had not worked in his favour. Because, if anything, she was in his head more than she had ever been.
Why? He was conditioned to run the minute things started getting heavy with a woman. So why was he dragging his heels now? Especially when Ellie had been the one to fire the starting gun. Was it because, for all his illusion of control, the simple truth was that he had always ambushed all chance of getting serious with anyone by choosing women he’d subconsciously known would end up boring him? Until Ellie had entered his life, leaving him here, not knowing what to do...
He frowned, absently reached for his phone, recognising that initial one-second flare of anticipation that there might be a missed call or a text waiting to be read from her, then opening up the photos he had taken in Barbados.
Yet again, he was surprised at just how many he had taken. There were pictures of her laughing, looking at him over her shoulder, sitting on the beach, making funny faces because she didn’t want him pointing the lens at her, even though the provocative flare in her eyes told another story.
Suddenly suffused with restless energy, thoughts previously sluggish accelerating with astonishing speed towards conclusions that now poured out from behind carefully sealed doors, he vaulted to his feet and strode to grab the trench coat draped over the back of a chair.
* * *
Ellie heard the sound of the doorbell with a grunt of displeasure.
It was a little after nine-thirty in the evening. Her mother was asleep and she was staring at a book on her lap, masochistically enjoying the pain of replaying images of James in her head and speculating on a future that held no joy at all.
At this very moment in time, she was staring down the barrel of no job, no desire to return to London, a deadline within which the stories she had started spinning to her mother about her break-up would have to accelerate and a bottomless pit of memories that promised sleepless nights wracked with misery.
The last thing she needed was one of her mother’s friends popping by to drop something off. From experience, she knew that many of her mother’s friends, all of them dog owners, thought nothing of having that last dog-walk late at night, using it as an excuse to deliver something or other, or nip in for a cup of coffee and a quick chat.
She opened the door with her polite expression at the ready...and for a few electrifying seconds felt the blood drain from her face as she stared up at the last person she expected to see standing outside her mother’s house.
A feeling of déjà vu slammed into her with the force of a sledgehammer and it was all she could do to remain standing in the doorway, as rigid as a block of marble.
What the heck was he doing here?
How many times did he have to walk away before he realised that walking away should remove the option of suddenly materialising on her doorstep?
She thought back to their last conversation, to her admission that she had fallen in love with him... She’d never seen a guy back away so fast. He’d seen the conflagration ahead, and had run in the opposite direction just as fast as his legs could take him. Even though she’d expected nothing less, she’d still been devastated at his response.
Mortification surged through her, as well as mounting anger. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded bluntly. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Let me in.’
‘Over my dead body.’ But she couldn’t help but sneak a glance towards the staircase behind her, because if her mother ventured out of her bedroom getting rid of James would not be possible.
Yes, Ellie had begun the process of cementing all the differences between her and James. All those niggling things that were already bricks in the wall that would eventually separate them.
With a timeline set for herself of a mere week, she knew the process would have to be ratcheted up. But at this point in time, a mere couple of days since James had returned to London, the foundations she had begun to lay would be blown out of the water should her mother clap eyes on the guy shamelessly standing at the front door.
She was infuriated that, despite everything she was feeling, she could still tune into his over-the-top sexuality with such effortless ease. The guy had practically had a seizure when she had admitted her true feelings for him, yet here she was, still fighting to ward off the spool of vibrant images unravelling in her head.
‘Where is your mother?’
‘Asleep,’ Ellie said sharply. ‘And I don’t want you coming in because I don’t want her to know that you’re here.’
She loved him.
She’d closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and admitted how she felt, because that was the sort of person she was. Honest, upfront and straightforward. But what had he done? He’d run faster than a sprinter at the sound of the starting gun.
Now, with her foot poised to nudge the door shut in his face, he felt a sickening sense of panic that he might have left things too late, because the truth was that love when it fell on barren ground, was quick to turn to hate...
What would he do without her in his life?
He felt giddy at the flashbacks that poured into his head—watching her down-bent head as she fiddled on her iPad, searching for just the thing he had asked for, her calm amusement at all his rowdy employees, who always seemed to do as she asked whenever she asked, the way she had guarded her private life and then shared it with him, handing him the gift of her confidences...
‘I was a complete fool.’ There was no point trying to preserve his dignity or play games in which he might emerge the winner. There was just this moment in time and his one chance to try and fix what he had wilfully broken.
‘I don’t want to have this conversation. I want you to go before Mum hears someone at the door. She might be a sound sle
eper, but doorbells can wake people up. I don’t want her seeing you. You’re not getting it, James. Don’t just stand there staring at me!’
‘I’m getting that you opened your heart to me and I—’
‘Now I really want you to go!’ The last thing Ellie needed to hear was a minute-by-minute recap of her soul-baring confession. When she had admitted to him how she felt, she hadn’t expected to clap eyes on him again, but now he was here, larger than life, and it was agony.
‘You love me.’ He breathed urgently, his voice lacking its usual self-assurance. ‘And it’s mutual.’ He said that very fast, to forestall her slamming the door on him.
On the verge of shutting the door very firmly on his well-heeled loafer, Ellie paused and looked at him suspiciously.
She’d been down this road before, hadn’t she? Let’s carry on, he’d urged. Where’s the harm? Let’s get what we have out of our systems and then we can break up...why not?
But surely he wouldn’t be so cruel as to use her own declaration of love against her in some stupid quest to take what he still wanted? Did he think that her loving him made her a dead cert for a replay, using the same reasoning he had used before? Was he arrogant enough to think that he would be doing her a favour by inviting her back into his bed, and would use whatever verbal tools he wanted, knowing that she was vulnerable to them all?
‘I hate you,’ she whispered, already in full defence mode at her own internal line of reasoning. It had leap frogged from assumption to assumption until she had managed to convince herself that she could not possibly believe anything he had come to say. Least of all some crazy, mumbled admission of love which he had pulled out of a hat like the proverbial rabbit.
She heard the shuffle of footsteps overhead and stifled a groan of frustration.
‘Just go! Mum’s waking up...’
‘Let me in. She doesn’t have to know that I’m here. I want to talk to you. When I’m done talking, I’ll leave and she will never know that I’ve been in the first place.’
‘Ellie? Did the doorbell just ring?’
Her mother’s thin voice quavered from the bedroom door which was just up the narrow stairs and mercifully out of sight.
‘Get in,’ she snapped at James, channelling him past her and towards the sitting room, into which he obediently vanished, leaving her to take the stairs two at a time, just preventing her mother from trundling down to see what the fuss was all about.
Five minutes later, she was in the sitting room, door closed, heart beating so fast she felt it was going to burst right out of her chest. She didn’t know what he was there for. He’d mentioned something about love, but it was clear and always had been that he hadn’t the faintest idea what love was.
The bottom line was that she had settled her mother back to bed after mumbling vaguely that nothing was happening, there was no need to come down—nothing to see here. But her mother’s eyes had been curious, and Ellie would have to dispatch James before curiosity got the better of sleep. Because, if her mother decided to see for herself what was going on, then all the hard work she had done building up stories of incompatibility, would have been for nothing.
In her mother’s mind, the very essence of love would be a guy racing hundreds of miles to be with the person he loved because he couldn’t bear to be apart from her.
She remained by the closed door, leaning against it, arms folded and eyes narrowed as she looked at him for a few seconds in stony, unforgiving silence.
‘Speak, and make it quick, James. I don’t want Mum coming downstairs and finding you sitting here.’
‘I can’t say what I’ve come here to say with you standing there by the door, like a prison warden waiting to escort a criminal from the building.’
Ellie sourly interpreted that to mean that he wanted her close, close enough to reach out and touch her. If he had come here hoping to scratch an itch that hadn’t conveniently disappeared as he’d hoped, then he would surely suspect that one touch and she’d be right back in his arms?
After all, she loved him, and love made idiots of everyone. Look at poor, deluded Naomi!
For the sake of voices not being heard, because noise had an irritating habit of travelling to all sorts of nooks and crannies in the small cottage, she edged closer. But, instead of perching on the sofa next to him, she adopted a stiff position on one of the chairs, from which she continued to look at him with jaundiced suspicion. It was an effort to keep memories at bay. She could feel them just there, waiting to surge forward to undermine all her barely-there resistance.
‘I’ve begun to explain things to Mum,’ she burst out fiercely, leaning forward. ‘I’ve begun to tell her that we’re very different people, too different for things to work out between us. I’ve begun to let her down, and it’s not fair of you to just show up here so you can ruin everything.’
‘We’re barely engaged. How can our differences be rising to the surface so fast?’
‘I know you!’ Bright patches of colour scored her cheeks. ‘Of course you were never going to fall in love with me. Do you think I haven’t seen the way you are with all those women you dated in the past?’ She looked away and her voice was low, bitter and honest. ‘No matter what they looked like, when it comes to women there’s only so much you’re capable of giving, and all of it can be summed up in two words. Good sex.’
‘Just good?’
‘I’m glad you think this is funny,’ Ellie said sharply.
‘I don’t.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and leant forward, arms resting loosely on his thighs.
‘I’m not climbing back into bed with you, and if I was stupid enough to fall for you then I’m also smart enough to know how the ground lies.’
James gazed at the mutinous set of her mouth, the defiant glitter in her eyes, and marvelled that he hadn’t recognised what he felt for her sooner than he had. Surely he should have clocked that so much more had pulled him to her than some passing attraction?
She fired him up on every front. She was demanding, smart and had spent three years making him adapt to her without him really realising it. It was crazy that he hadn’t seen that for what it was—a slow drift to an emotion he only now recognised and accepted.
‘I don’t want you falling back into bed with me,’ he countered softly, and a shadow of bewilderment flashed across her features for a barely perceptible second or two.
He winced, thinking that those were the tramlines her thoughts were travelling down—that the only thing he could possibly have come for was sex. He honestly couldn’t blame her.
‘Good!’ Ellie said stiffly. ‘Because there’s no way I intend to do that.’
‘I wouldn’t ask you to, unless there was a ring on your finger.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I love you.’
Ellie stared. Her mouth fell open. Her brain moved back sluggishly half an hour, to recall his opening words when she had greeted him at the front door.
Had he meant what he’d said? That he loved her?
‘I don’t understand...’ She managed to breathe while her heart picked up frantic speed and her mouth dried up so that she could barely swallow. Joined up thinking was proving difficult.
‘When we went to Barbados...’ He sighed heavily, channelling his thoughts. ‘Falling into bed with you... I didn’t look beyond a straightforward situation of two people who had discovered their mutual attraction to one another, recognised it and decided to follow where it led. Under a tropical sun, things blossomed, and it was all very black and white.
‘I look back on my life and I see that it was always very black and white when it came to relationships. I knew what loss was about, and in my mind it was always associated with the emotional freefall that came from loving someone and then being let down by them. If you never loved, then you could never be let down.’
‘And wha
t began in Barbados was going to stay in Barbados,’ Ellie said softly, remembering just how clear he had been on the rules of the game, at which point she had blithely deferred thinking about tomorrow because today was too much fun.
‘Come and sit next to me,’ he murmured, patting the space beside him on the sofa. Ellie hesitantly shifted over to the spot and curled up, feet tucked underneath her, still too suspicious to go too close but already opening up to the roughened honesty of his voice and what he was saying to her.
He covered her hand with his but respected the small distance she had made to maintain between them.
‘That was the plan,’ he said gravely.
‘Until Naomi appeared and blew everything out of the water.’
‘Everything had been blown out of the water long before then,’ he mused thoughtfully. ‘I always assumed that I was immune to emotional involvement with any woman. Like I said, I lost both lost parents when I was young, but you lost a parent devoted to you. I lost parents who were devoted to one another. Money bought them freedom from any kind of conscience. They dipped in and out of our lives. They were spectators, you could say, although in Izzy’s case perhaps that would be an exaggeration. She got the brunt of their attention. For me...’
He shook his head ruefully. ‘Not so much. You’d think, that being the case, that their loss would have been felt less, but not so. It felt like questions I had yet to ask could then never be answered.’
Ellie shifted closer to him so that her knee was touching his thigh and she could feel the spread of warmth from his body, enfolding her like a safety blanket.
It struck her that there was something about him that had always made her feel safe, even when she had just been his dutiful secretary. She had always known that he had her back. When she thought about it, all the time he’d been telling her that he didn’t do emotional investment, he had been showing her that he did. And that had culminated in him trekking across the Atlantic to hold her hand and support her because he had known that she would need him, even without her having to tell him. He knew her, just as she knew him.
Claiming His Cinderella Secretary Page 16