by Heidi Rice
He imagined for a moment the fallout if the chaos of the last fifteen minutes made it into tomorrow’s papers. His PR team would have him becoming a hermit next. But suddenly Alex realised none of this made him the slightest bit regretful. If anything, absconding from the dull exhibition, rescuing a delightfully out-of-her-depth Jen, felt like a small victory in the face of the ridiculous media manipulation supposedly taking place on his behalf.
‘Why do it, then?’ she asked him.
‘Do what?’
She gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘Why escort me anywhere?’
She leaned in towards him, putting a slim hand on his arm and enveloping him in the vanilla scent of her perfume. His pulse kicked in response, hard.
‘Why not just ignore me, let me get on with my evening while you do whatever it is you people do at these places? Buy one of those ghastly pictures, maybe? I didn’t ask you to drag me out of there. I was managing perfectly well by myself.’
Thrown by his body’s instant reaction to her touch, he plucked her hand from his arm and moved it back into her own personal space.
‘I was saving you from making a total fool of yourself,’ he said. Not strictly true. The sensible thing would have been to leave her to her own devices, keep as much space between them as he could.
He refused to acknowledge how he’d felt on spotting her across the gallery. At first he’d assumed she was there watching him, convinced as he was that she was now planning to write some story about him. But a few minutes’ observation had made it obvious she hadn’t a clue that he was there. Intrigued as to what on earth she was doing there on her own, he’d been unable to concentrate on the pictures or the conversation. His eyes had kept dragging themselves back to where she stood, nervously fiddling with her handbag, not speaking to anyone.
He’d seen how her confidence had grown in proportion to her champagne consumption. Watched her grow louder and more animated. And finally he’d watched her throw herself at Viscount Dulverwell, gazing raptly into his face as he talked, only breaking her focus on him to grab yet more champagne. For some reason watching her start out nervous and unspoilt, as if she were at her first grown-up night out, and slowly morph into a vivacious flirt had bothered the hell out of him. Whatever her reasons were, whatever she was doing there, he hadn’t been prepared to wait until the end of the evening for an explanation.
Back at the apartment he took her firmly by the shoulders, marched her through the kitchen into the den and deposited her on the sofa while he made industrial-strength black coffee. The silky feel of her shoulders under his hands had him wondering if she felt that satiny all over. He crushed the thought from his mind. Maybe the fact she’d drunk too much was a good thing. If he were to pursue that impulse he would want all her wits and senses at his disposal.
Not that it was even a possibility.
While he waited for the kettle to boil he skimmed an e-mail Mark had sent while he was out. When he came back she’d kicked off the skyscraper heels and pulled the pins out of her hair. It fell in soft waves to her shoulders. She looked suddenly very vulnerable and he curbed the temptation to snap at her.
He sat down opposite her and leaned forward.
‘I want to know exactly what is going on. What you’re really doing in London. Why you’re in my flat, snooping in my cupboards, and why you were at that reception tonight by yourself. You tell me everything or I put you in a taxi right now.’
‘You can’t do that,’ she said defiantly. She sipped her coffee and grimaced at the strength of it but didn’t complain. ‘You don’t know what I might say to my press contacts.’
He held that defiant blue gaze unwaveringly with his own.
‘Which contacts do you mean?’ he asked. ‘The one who runs the agricultural desk? Or maybe Births, Marriages and Deaths? They’re standard fare in a village newspaper, aren’t they?’
Mark’s e-mail had given full details of her current employment. No tabloid newspaper contacts in sight.
Silence for a long moment, with the blue eyes fixed on his. Then she looked down at her coffee cup.
‘You checked up on me,’ she said accusingly.
‘You turn up out of the blue, living in my apartment and refusing to leave, no matter how much money I put on the table. Not to mention all the weird stalker stuff. Did you honestly think for one second I wouldn’t check up on you?’
He didn’t add that he checked up on everyone these days, no matter how insignificant they seemed. Trust seemed to have been phased out of his life since Susan had left. After five years it was all but gone.
Jen took another sip of her coffee, pushed her hair back from her face. Her expression was steadier when she looked back at him. Sobriety seemed to be slipping back.
‘I’m sorry about the weird stalker stuff,’ she said. ‘I’m not, in fact, a weird stalker.’
She paused and he waited for her to elaborate, waited to see if she’d feed him another line or actually come clean this time.
She took a deep breath. ‘I’m working on an article I pitched to Gossip! magazine.’ She searched his face.
He raised mystified eyebrows.
‘It’s the biggest-selling women’s magazine in this country,’ she explained. ‘I managed to land an internship there for the last three months, and at the end I pitched my own idea for an article.’
The look on her face was disbelief mingled with delight.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying for the past three years to break into mainstream women’s journalism but it’s so damn competitive. There’s a permanent job vacancy there and the editor said if I can pull this off I’ve got a great chance of landing it. A proper career. Not just an internship. This is my big break—my foot in the door. Christmas is my deadline, I have to file my copy by then.’
‘And how does trying on my clothes and flirting with Viscount Dulverwell fit in to all this?’
She took a breath.
‘My article investigates whether it’s possible for an ordinary Miss Nobody …’ she glanced up at him ‘… someone like me … to reinvent herself and win the heart of a millionaire.’
He stared at her, wondering if he’d actually heard correctly.
‘Obviously a rich man with half a brain wouldn’t look twice at me normally, because he’d assume someone like me must be a gold-digger, right?’
A sick feeling rose in the pit of his stomach as Susan flashed into his mind again.
‘So I need to give the impression that I have money and success of my own. An address in the right postcode, the right clothes, the right things to say.’ She took a sip of her coffee. ‘And the right places to go. That’s why I was at the exhibition. And that’s why I’ve been taking a bit of an interest in your clothes and your lifestyle. I would have asked you outright but I didn’t think you’d take kindly to the idea, given … well, given …’
Incredulity mingled with outrage. Given the fact that the one person I trusted, wanted to spend my life with, turned out to have pound signs in her eyes and not a lot else …
‘Given my past, right?’ he said.
Not for the first time he felt a surge of fury that his private life was public property.
‘You mean to tell me you’re posing as some socialite so you can bag a rich man? I’ve never heard anything so ludicrous!’
‘It’s not real. I don’t really want to “bag a rich man”, as you put it. Personally I’d rather eat my own head than get involved with someone like that.’
Even in his amazement he didn’t miss the venom in that comment, and wondered where it had come from.
‘It’s a way of writing about that whole rich, sumptuous world without it just being a run-of-the-mill description. The editor of Gossip! wouldn’t have wasted a second on me if I was just writing a straightforward article because that’s been done a million times. The way I’m doing it is more fun. It gives an original spin. It’s intended to be tongue-in-cheek, not serious.’
‘Well, it’s never going to work. I can tell you that now. You think a few new clothes and hanging out in the right places is enough?’
‘You were there, weren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘I said, you were there. Tonight. According to a recent poll you are the thirty-sixth most eligible bachelor in England right now. I checked.’
She’d been checking up on him? His mind zeroed in on that piece of information. He would revisit it later.
‘What’s your point?’
‘That in order to meet a wealthy, eligible man you have to go to the right places. And I did. I just … drank a bit more champagne than I should have.’ She rubbed a hand tiredly across her forehead. ‘I’m not really used to it.’
‘I think the whole article idea is laughable,’ he said shortly.
She leaned forward and spoke slowly and clearly. ‘It’s a tongue-in-cheek social experiment. It isn’t serious.’
‘Judging by this evening, the experiment isn’t panning out all that well.’ He felt an unexpected jolt of regret as he saw the look in her eyes. Clearly she wasn’t happy with the way it was going. Question was, why the hell did he care?
‘I’m not giving up,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re hoping. That I’ll just throw in the towel, pack my bags and be out of your hair. I’m going to make this work, no matter what it takes.’
‘Nice though it would be to get my life back, I wouldn’t expect you to go quietly.’
And that was the whole point, really, wasn’t it? He was used to maintaining absolute control over every aspect of his life, used to excluding anyone or anything that could take advantage of him. If he wanted something he went after it. If he didn’t want something he found a way of avoiding it. His wealth and position made that entirely possible. And now his lack of control over this situation, over her, was driving him nuts. Well, not for much longer.
‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ he said.
Interest sparked in her face. She sat forward, the blue eyes shrewd. The only sign of the champagne now was in the dark circles beneath them.
‘A confidentiality agreement,’ he said. ‘You sign that and I allow you to stay here for the month. Long enough for you to finish your insane undercover article.’
The leave-nothing-to-chance reliability of a signed agreement appealed to him. He’d long since learned from the mistakes of his past.
‘A gag order?’ Her tone was tinged with contempt. ‘You want to control my freedom of speech?’
Had he really expected her to sign on the dotted line without a word of protest?
‘It’s nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a standard contract. All my staff sign one as a condition of their employment.’
‘I’m not staff. And you might consider giving someone else control over your life to be nothing out of the ordinary, but I don’t.’
‘We’ll both benefit from it. I’m not asking you to cut your tongue out—you can write about any other damn thing you like except for me.’
He felt a stab of exasperation. Did she have any clue at all what it was like to be on the receiving end of the press pack? To go through the worst of times and have to elbow your way through photographers just to leave the house? And, when they couldn’t get what they wanted from you, to have them hound your family? To read about private details of your marriage break-up in the papers, your heartbreak there in black and white for anyone to see?
He watched her staring into her coffee for a moment, deep in thought. Eventually she looked up at him, a frown touching her eyebrows.
‘I could do with a new approach, I’ll admit,’ she said slowly. ‘So how about we strike a deal?’
Mark would have insisted he halt the conversation right there, withdraw the offer and tell her to go and pack. But there was something about her defiant attitude that he couldn’t help responding to. In spite of himself, it stirred him. In more ways than one. To put his business interests first he had to curb his socialising. Yet solitude did not come easily to him, and having her here would offer some diversion. The question was whether that was a good thing or not.
He put his coffee cup down and met her gaze.
‘What kind of deal?’
She shrugged.
‘I admit you might have a point about my press contacts. I don’t know anyone in the national press. But I could still make trouble. It wouldn’t take much for me to ring up the entertainment correspondent of one of the daily tabloids and give the inside story of my few days in your company following your scandal.’
A counter-threat. He wouldn’t have expected anything less.
‘So you understand where I’m coming from?’ he said.
She nodded. ‘And I’m prepared to sign your agreement if you change the conditions. Your offer is to let me stay here, but I’m going to ask for a bit more than that.’
He wasn’t sure he’d ever met anyone who pushed their luck so hard.
‘Go on,’ he said slowly.
‘What I need right now is an adviser. To help me get my article back on track. Someone who knows the world I’m writing about and can give me a few pointers.’
He stared at her.
‘You want me to help you trick some unsuspecting millionaire into thinking you’re a rich socialite?’
‘In a nutshell, yes. But not in a direct way. I just want to be able to ask your opinion on a few things, that’s all. Clothes, locations, that kind of thing.’
He needed time out to think.
‘I think it’s a fair offer,’ she added.
As she put her empty coffee cup down on the table he got to his feet and reached for it.
‘I’ll make some more coffee,’ he said.
She grabbed his hand as he picked up her mug. Sparks of heat tingled through his wrist and zipped down his spine. There was something so alluring about her—and it messed with his body, not just with his mind. Her upturned face was imploring, the blue eyes clear.
‘I’m no threat to you. I honestly have no interest in making trouble for you. And we’re not that different. You told me you started out with ideas above your station and that’s what I’ve got. I just need this chance.’
He looked into the pleading blue eyes. He must be mad.
She took her hand back and he straightened up, made his way back to the kitchen, knowing that he should be ejecting her from the apartment right now.
She was right about selling her story. She could still make life difficult for him if she wanted to.
He had a choice. He could make her move out now, take a chance that any fuel she added to the scandal fire would be short-lived. Or he could go along with her crazy scheme, get the gag order in place and keep her here with him for the month. The inherent danger in that thought made his pulse-rate climb. He ignored it.
It burned that he was expected to toe the line of the studios, the management, to restrain his private life. After clawing his way up from nothing to get where he was, and having been knocked halfway down again by Susan, being held back in any way now was abhorrent to him. His one failed attempt at family life had been dissected and trampled on by the media. Living the high life was payback for that. He enjoyed spending time in the company of beautiful women, but he never let it get serious enough to have emotional consequences. Let them print that he was screwing this model, or that actress. He didn’t care whether it was true or not.
Jen wanted him to spend a bit of time giving his opinion on clothes and the like? How hard could that be? With his social life reined in he’d have plenty of time on his hands. Let her stay here and work on her mad project. It would give him a few laughs if nothing else. And he’d far rather look at her long legs and big blue eyes than stare at these four walls.
He could tell Mark he’d secured her silence. No need to mention that he’d given in a little on the terms of the agreement. Or that he found the prospect of spending a month living side-by-side with Jen dangerously attractive.
He refilled their coffee cu
ps and made his way back into the den. He stopped in the doorway. She was curled up in the corner of the sofa, brown hair spilling over the cushion, sleeping. His heart turned over gently. For a split second he toyed with picking her up and carrying her to her bed. And then the memory of the other night drifted back—the thought of her beneath him, his for the taking. He mouth felt too dry all of a sudden.
There was kicking back and there was recklessness.
He put the coffee down on the table and grabbed the hideous patchwork throw she was so attached to. He tucked it around her and left the room.
Every movement around the kitchen jarred Jen’s aching head. She cooked dry toast, took headache pills, then sat on one of the stools and swigged orange juice. All the usual tricks for dealing with a hangover. If she was going to feel this grim at the very least she should have had the luxury of memory loss—the kind where you missed hour-long sections from the previous night as if you’d been abducted by aliens rather than drunk too much champagne.
The humiliation of being escorted from the exhibition by Alex played on a loop in her head. She’d tossed a drink over a member of the aristocracy. For a professional journalist she knew her behaviour had been pitiful. And the coup de grâce that really made her cringe? Collapsing in Alex Hammond’s arms on the gallery steps. Her face burned just at the thought of it. That they hadn’t been swamped by the gawping paparazzi was down to pure luck and Alex’s super-fast driver. Clearly the press had been as surprised as she was to see him at the gallery, and the car had pulled away with seconds to spare.
As soon as her head calmed down she would go and pack. All hope was gone of his letting her stay here. The champagne might have given her the courage to propose they strike a deal, but that had been her big mistake. Alex Hammond would never stoop to negotiate with someone like her. He’d see it as a challenge to his authority. Men like him did what worked for them. He’d wanted rid of her from the moment he arrived and now he’d got his way.
Deep down it wasn’t the leaving that was the problem. Yes, it would be a setback. She had a ton of designer clobber winging its way to this address. A pain, but fixable. No, the thing that really rankled was that he’d got what he wanted despite her best efforts. Another rich man letting nothing get in his way—especially a nobody like her. She knew she could sell a story about him, but she was in this for the long haul. She didn’t want fifteen minutes of fame for a flash-in-the-pan exposé and a one-off payment. She wanted to make a serious career out of writing, and that meant maintaining journalistic integrity. What if she wanted to interview a celebrity at some time in the future? She would never be trustworthy if she sold Alex out now.