The Morning After the Night Before: Love & Lust in the city that never sleeps!

by Nikki Logan

  ‘All two of them? Lovely. I could get used to it.’

  Just part of what baffled him about Izzy Dean: apparently miserable in her job yet a work ethic strong enough to have her at her desk before everyone else arrived. Brilliant operator until the day she just…stopped trying.

  He leaned one hip on the kitchen island and kept his voice as casual as he could so she wouldn’t remember that he’d virtually promised to leave when she gave him his beer. ‘When do you start your new job?’

  Her pupils flared enough to see from across the island. ‘Not…immediately. I’m looking forward to some time off.’

  ‘Nice for some.’

  ‘Please…’ The word bloomed mist on the edge of her glass as she took a sip. His whole body tightened at the reminder of her spectacular performance in the office. ‘You can’t tell me your management salary doesn’t buy you whatever leisure time you want.’

  ‘Not if I want to keep making that salary,’ he muttered. ‘I haven’t had a decent break in five years.’

  That, at least, was true. He spent nearly as much time at home researching the business as he did in the office delivering it. Downtime was lost time in his book.

  ‘Well, that explains a lot.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Perhaps if you had a holiday now and again you would be a little easier to work with.’

  With champagne came courage, apparently.

  ‘You think I’m hard to work with?’

  She didn’t miss his emphasis. ‘I do, actually. I’m more of a more flies from honey kind of person.’

  Yeah. He’d bet. Pretty much anything to do with honey fitted Isadora Dean. Her skin tone, her voice. His eyes drifted straight to her lips.

  Honey. Definitely.

  ‘You think a manager should be nice to his staff, all the time?’ he said, to distract himself from that line of thought.

  ‘I think a working relationship is a partnership, not a tyranny.’

  ‘A partnership in which I pay you to work.’

  ‘Just think how much more productive I’d be if I was interested in earning your respect.’

  Ouch.

  But he at least took some solace from her use of the present tense. Maybe this whole thing was just a ploy for more money from an ambitious employee. Effective: he was authorised to up her pay packet by ten grand.

  ‘I have thirty-three direct reports in this role. Not too sustainable to be buddy-buddy with each of them.’

  Especially not when he kept finding reasons to haul a particularly sexy and recalcitrant one into his office.

  ‘Boohoo.’ She tossed back the last of her champagne. ‘Anyway, officially not my problem since I’m not your employee anymore and never will be.’

  He shifted closer. And he liked it. He’d never allowed himself to get this close to her before. Too dangerous.

  ‘Never?’

  She stood her ground. ‘Nope.’

  ‘You have no price that you’ll eventually come to after a day or two of faux deliberation?’

  Insult blazed heavily in her pretty eyes. ‘Nope.’

  She pressed her hand to her breast and all it did was remind him she had them. His eyes went straight to those long, champagne-sticky fingers pressed against her blouse and the slight curve beneath. But he fought it.

  ‘Everyone has a price.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ She gaped. ‘To see what it will cost you to get me back?’

  He wasn’t about to let her start thinking that she was special. ‘We invest a lot in our staff. I don’t like to see anyone walk away with that investment. Or our corporate knowledge.’

  ‘I signed your confidentiality agreement. Broadmore Natále’s secrets are safe with me.’

  Actually, he believed her. She might be a princess but she’d always been a discreet and professional princess. Wednesday excepted. And peering up at him as she was—all enormous-eyed and unflinching—she certainly looked very sincere.

  And he was through begging.

  Rifkin be damned.

  ‘I told them you’d tell me to go to hell.’

  Realisation dawned in her eyes. And with it, a hot little smile. ‘Oh, I see… You’ve been sent.’

  He just glared.

  She shifted onto one hip and the move changed the angle of the classy outfit she was wearing, highlighting the line of her body. ‘That must really pain you.’

  You have no idea.

  ‘I gave it a shot,’ he breathed. ‘I need to get your keycard back, then.’

  All warmth from their sparring drained from her eyes like the dregs from her glass. ‘Security can’t just disable it?’

  ‘They’re ten-quid access cards.’

  She flushed and actually looked a little hurt that he didn’t even consider her worth ten pounds.

  Really? That was her hot button—devaluing her? Handy to know.

  ‘Whatever. Follow me.’

  The sudden distance she put between them was almost like a cool chill after the warmth of their heated discussion. Exactly when had it stopped being business and started being flirting? He took one final tug on his beer then left the three-quarters-full bottle on the kitchen bench and trailed her back out through the doors, being sure to appreciate the round sway of her arse.

  Now that he could.

  TWO

  ‘Watch yourself,’ Izzy murmured exactly as her ex-boss ducked sideways and down to avoid clipping his egotistically big head on the steel frame of the mezzanine stairs going up to the bedroom above them. Though a scar would probably only make him more handsome.

  She shoved her shoulder against her door.

  ‘You’re kidding me,’ he said over the party music. ‘This is you?’

  Spinning revealed him to be much closer than she’d expected. And it only served to remind her how tiny her new room really was. And how chaotic.

  ‘Much as I’d like to lock you in the store room as a hilarious prank and listen to you beating at the door while no one else could hear you, I do, in fact, need to sleep in here tonight. So I’ll just find my ID card and you can be on your way.’

  ‘What happened to the turret?’

  Why did he look so concerned? ‘Poppy’s renting it to someone else.’

  ‘Your best friend evicted you?’

  ‘God, no. She’d never ask that. I swapped rooms. Economies of scale.’

  ‘Economical is right,’ he murmured. ‘I have a linen closet bigger than this.’

  She smiled tightly. ‘Are you always so gracious?’

  Colour streaked up his jaw and it confused her as much as a rare trace of humility in him always did. ‘I just… It doesn’t fit.’

  ‘Nothing fits, as you can see.’

  He dragged his gaze the very short distance from the left of the room to the right, taking in her pathetic bed and her mounded-up belongings. ‘Is this because you quit the firm?’

  Something about the size of him in her tiny room, the male scent swilling into every corner, the sexy accent and maybe the multiple champagnes in quick succession stole all but the most essential air from her lungs. But not so much that she couldn’t protest his monumental ego.

  ‘The world does not revolve around you, Harry Mitchell, surprising as that may be.’

  ‘So you chose to live like this because…?’

  ‘Because I’m careful with my money.’ Oh, such lies. ‘And because it’s easier for Poppy to rent the best room than this one.’

  It had nothing at all to do with the fact that despite earning stupid money for the past few years she’d actually managed to put very little of it away for the rainy day that had now come. That she’d gone a bit spend-mad with the first real money she’d ever had at her disposal and then become ridiculously accustomed to it. Reliant on it. Which made the myriad belongings cluttered around them now very quality belongings…but still clutter.

  And not the gently shambolic clutter of her parents’ meagre belongings. The clutter of someone with a life rapi
dly outgrowing her circumstances.

  Much like her ambition.

  She’d always had a disconnection between what she wanted and what life had given her. The only girl in her childhood estate with big-city ambitions.

  Many people might call it denial.

  Behind her, Harry leaned on the wall while she began the hunt for her work ID card. It wasn’t in the pile she’d hastily thrown together at her desk. No, that was because she’d been wearing it that day.

  Her jacket… Where was Wednesday’s jacket?

  She turned back for the door and paused in front of his inconvenient bulk.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Harry straightened and she squeezed past, the back of her calves pressing against her bed and her front brushing against the expensive fabric of his open coat. His lips twisted as he stretched taller to give her space and politely focused over her head on a point across the small room. Izzy rummaged around in the clothes hanging on the back of the door they’d just come through until she found the cropped jersey jacket she’d worn on Wednesday, and unclipped the security tag still pinned to its lapel.

  ‘There you go.’ She pressed it into his front as she squeezed past again.

  His fingers automatically came up to catch it before she dropped it, but they snagged hers instead, pressing them into his not inconsiderable chest.

  Izzy froze. Hard heat soaked through his cotton shirt and charred her skin.

  ‘Seriously,’ he urged as her eyes flashed up to him, his fingers still holding hers captive, ‘reconsider.’

  His voice had dropped down somewhere much more gravelly and, down there, his accent did its best work.

  ‘Seriously,’ she mimicked. ‘I don’t go back on my decisions.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘Ever.’

  ‘Even the bad ones?’

  ‘Especially the bad ones. There’s no going back from those, only forwards.’ And she knew that from experience.

  She glanced up into his fathomless eyes and heard her next words tumble from her lips. Surprised even herself with her candour. ‘That job was killing me. It was time. Regardless of everything else.’

  ‘You’ve only been in it for a couple of years.’

  ‘It’s not boredom. It’s—’ me! ‘—the work.’

  ‘So, go for a different job within the firm.’

  She suddenly became aware that her fingers still pressed into his pectoral region and she tugged them gently free and curled them at her side. ‘What is it to you? Why do you even care?’

  ‘Because you were a good employee,’ he murmured down at her, all smoky intensity. ‘My best.’

  Pfff. ‘We fought every day.’

  He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and the move effectively pushed him out from the wall and a smidge closer to her. She didn’t step back. On principle. This was her domain, tiny as it might be. The scented heat pumping off him pleasantly consumed her.

  ‘You challenged me every day,’ he corrected.

  It felt odd testing him now, standing this close and peering up at him. Hardly a position of power. Yet she felt as if the cards were all hers. ‘You made some bad decisions.’

  It was only when his lips twisted so fully that she remembered what a nice mouth he had. When it wasn’t issuing ridiculous demands.

  ‘Clearly you thought so. But they were my decisions to make.’

  ‘If you just want a bunch of yes-men in your department then why are you here, trying to get me back?’

  ‘Because diversity is apparently healthy in a workforce—’

  ‘Not if it’s only token.’

  ‘—and because, surprising as it might seem, I appreciate spirit in women.’

  ‘Like horses?’ She snorted.

  He wisely ignored that. ‘Spirit and brains.’

  ‘Uh-huh. So all those times you and I ended up locking horns, that was…appreciation making you flush red?’

  He did it again now and it added a dangerous kind of gleam to his eyes.

  ‘You tell me.’

  She crossed her arms angrily and it only served to plump her minor cleavage up a tad in the aperture of her blouse when viewed from virtually above. Which, naturally, he took full advantage of. Izzy dropped her hands by her side, instead, to take away his toy. It left his eyes nowhere to go but back to hers, all simmering and smart and way, way too close.

  ‘Come on, Dean,’ he purred, ‘you can’t say our…discussions didn’t give the daily grind a productive boost.’

  There were times she’d have liked to have boosted Harry Mitchell right out of his twelfth-floor window. ‘Strange as it may seem to you, my productivity goes up when I’m respected professionally.’

  His eyebrows shot up. ‘You think I don’t respect you?’

  ‘You don’t respect my opinion. Anyone’s really.’

  ‘Disagreeing with it and not respecting it aren’t the same thing. Anyway, occasionally I did agree with you.’

  She knew. And weren’t those days the most confusing of all? Because he did so unconditionally. And wholeheartedly. She bit her lip and his gaze went straight to the childhood gesture.

  ‘You know what I’m starting to think?’ he murmured, still checking out the nibble of her teeth on her lips.

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘Maybe all our fighting was just sexual tension in disguise.’

  The room was way too small for her bark of a laugh. It fairly ricocheted off the walls. ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘Not at all.’ He grinned and it was the most predatory she’d ever seen from him. And smug.

  ‘Because you’re so irresistible?’

  ‘Because we have chemistry. I thought it was just me but Wednesday put a big question mark over that.’

  No, they didn’t. Not chemistry and not Harry Mitchell. Hot or not. ‘Maybe you’re just projecting your own hormones.’

  ‘You don’t feel it?’

  Challenge, not question. As if he already knew the answer. As if she did, too. But they bred them tough in Manchester. She tossed her short hair back. ‘Not particularly.’

  Liar, liar…

  ‘February twenty-first this year,’ he challenged. ‘We shared the same lift and the end-of-day rush pushed us together at the back. We didn’t speak a word to each other and the only uncovered parts of us touching were our ungloved hands.’ He stepped a tiny bit closer. ‘But we both walked out of the building rubbing the tingles away.’

  ‘No, we—’

  ‘April third.’ He lifted his chin. ‘I knocked back one of your ideas and you spent a good portion of the day glaring at me through the walls—all flushed and infuriated and eyes spitting—and I spent a good portion of the day with half a hard-on, as a result.’

  No way her gasp should have caught quite that tightly in her chest. She should have been outraged, not breathless.

  Not excited.

  Her glares across her crowded open-plan office to his lofty glassed-in one had simmered, and not always with anger. She’d felt it but had no idea he’d been able to see it.

  God…

  ‘You’re making these up.’

  ‘Check your diary,’ he dismissed, plunging his hands even deeper in his pockets. ‘June eleventh, just before lunch. You stood in my office giving me hell about the new ratios and I just let you run because I was curious.’

  She swallowed back a lump of dread. She remembered June eleventh. The room had been practically soaked with awareness and she’d come away fairly throbbing from the argument. And then she’d beaten herself up all day about the inappropriateness of it all. He was her boss. He was the bad guy.

  Words formed themselves despite her best intentions.

  ‘Curious about what?’ she croaked.

  His lips twisted. ‘Have you never heard the saying that a person fights like they f—?’

  ‘Stop!’ Air sucked hard into her lungs and then froze there, trapped, making it harder to squeeze out, ‘I thought that was dancing.’
/>   ‘I found June eleventh extremely illuminating on that front. But nowhere near as illuminating as Wednesday. Wednesday was a real eye-opener.’

  Her only hope of salvation here was in channelling a bit of Tori’s hearty sexual confidence. She tossed her hair back and met his eyes directly.

  ‘You never let on.’

  ‘Of course not. It wasn’t appropriate.’

  Hysteria bubbled dangerously close. ‘And this is?’

  ‘You’re not exactly moving away from me.’

  She glanced at the junk all around them. ‘That’s more a statement about my hoarding than your hotness.’

  Crap. Not what she’d meant to say. At all.

  His left eyebrow lifted. ‘I’m hot?’

  ‘You’re insufferable.’ That smug grin sure was.

  ‘You think I’m attractive.’

  ‘I think you’re dangerously close to a lawsuit.’

  His laugh echoed her earlier bark. ‘For what?’

  ‘Employee sexual harassment.’

  He waggled her ID tag. ‘You quit, remember?’

  ‘Then, sexual harassment just generally.’

  He shuffled closer. ‘You still haven’t asked me to leave. That’s all it will take.’

  No. Why was that…?

  ‘Maybe I’m hoping chivalry isn’t dead.’ Maybe, deep down inside, she wanted to give him one more chance to be a decent man.

  ‘Grand chivalric gestures were the only outlet for all the unrequited sexual frustration in the twelfth century.’ He shot her his best Cheshire grin. ‘Like our fighting.’

  ‘Well, then, perhaps your grand gesture could involve sweeping heroically out the door and nicking off.’

  His smile this time was half laugh. And it was annoyingly appealing. ‘Or we could find a more traditional outlet for all the tension.’

  ‘No.’ It would be laughable if the very thought hadn’t divested her of the oxygen she’d need to do it.

  ‘Are you already in a relationship?’ he challenged. ‘I’m not.’

  Izzy grasped desperately at the edges of the conversation. Harry’s eyes said he was dead serious, but how could he be? This sort of thing never happened to her. Despite her best efforts.

  She sucked in some much-needed air. ‘Except with your career.’