One-Click Buy: September Harlequin Presents

by Penny Jordan

  He landed back in his chair and swung it around to face the city beyond the great smoked-glass window in his corner office, and ran a hard hand over his chin.

  ‘Well, what do you know?’ Caleb said, breathing over his shoulder. ‘The cat lady’s a hottie.’

  ‘Of course she is,’ Damien spat out. ‘It’s her.’

  ‘Her? Her who?’

  ‘The woman from the restaurant.’

  ‘But she was blonde and—’

  ‘Not the G-stringed teeny bopper. The one who fell into my arms when you were in the loo. I pointed her out to you just before we left.’

  Caleb looked closer. ‘Bloody hell, you’re right. She was hot too.’

  Damien turned his chair back to face his office, dropped the phone to the desk and leant his forehead into his open palms. ‘Her ticket must have fallen to the floor when she fell. I picked it up. And by all that’s holy we have the same phone.’

  ‘You lucky sod,’ Caleb said. ‘Now what you have to do is ring her again, tell her you have to change your appointment to later in the evening. Book a table. Get there early. Order a bottle of wine…And why aren’t you writing any of this down?’

  Damien shook his head. ‘Because I broke up with Bonnie little more than a month ago. I can’t…’

  Want some stranger with such all-consuming immediacy, he’d been about to say. Instead he went with the much safer, ‘I’m of the thought that it would be better for me to not indulge in such pursuits just yet.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you marry the girl. Or any girl, for that matter. Dinner. Cocktails. Maybe a grope in the back of the cab on the way home. Sounds like a perfectly fine Tuesday evening, if you ask me.’

  Damien did his best not to let Caleb’s words infiltrate. When it came to dealing with the fairer sex Caleb was a schmuck. But he certainly painted a nice picture. Her soft, soothing scent still lingered on his jacket even now. Who knew what levels of pleasure more than two minutes in one another’s company might bring them? Certainly more pleasure than he’d had in some time.

  ‘So are you going to call Amelie’s or should I do it for you?’

  Damien glared up at his friend. ‘Don’t you have work to do?’

  ‘Slave-driver,’ Caleb said.

  And as soon as Caleb sauntered from Damien’s office with a wink and a smile, he was on the phone to Amelie’s to insist they give him a last-minute table to make up for the emotional stress they’d put him through.

  Caleb wasn’t often right, but this time he might have been just on the money. The time to get back on the horse was nigh.

  Chelsea came back into her office after cleaning and disinfecting the green room feeling as bad as the poor Joneses’ dog had looked. She was wet and bedraggled from top to toe. And she wasn’t certain her shoes had managed to avoid every little surprise left on the concrete floor.

  The mobile phone on her desk was buzzing and vibrating until she felt it in her fillings.

  ‘It’s been doing that for ten minutes,’ Kensey said from her position on the soft window-seat in Chelsea’s office, her nose buried in a catalogue of doggie accessories.

  ‘So why don’t you answer it?’ Chelsea asked, pulling off her long-sleeved T-shirt and replacing it with an exact match, though one that was warmer and dryer.

  ‘Fine,’ Kensey said with a sigh, then grabbed the phone, flipped it open, and stared for a few moments, her expression so blank Chelsea began to get worried.

  ‘What? Tell me. It’s him, isn’t it? Is he creepy? Is he famous? Is he my evil twin? What?’

  But when Kensey began to laugh, so hard she clutched her belly and drew her knees to her chest for support, Chelsea grabbed the phone.

  She stared at the picture. It was slightly askew, cutting off his left ear and showing far too much room atop his head, but the face, that face, was unmistakable.

  Thick, dark, preppy-perfect hair. A dead straight nose. And permanently smiling blue eyes. Damien Halliburton of the creamy voice, charmingly off-kilter sense of humour, and apparent predilection for zebra-print underwear was the very man into whose arms she had fallen.

  Chelsea sank into her chair with a thud. ‘It’s him, isn’t it? It’s really him.’

  Kensey nodded.

  ‘And now I have to go back there, tonight, and see him again.’

  ‘You sure do.’

  She glanced down at the wet patches on her old jeans, and flicked a blob of soapy hair from her cheek. ‘He won’t remember I’m, you know, the girl with the bad balance, will he?’

  ‘You have been given a second chance to blind the guy with your fabulousness. Does it matter if he remembers you?’

  Chelsea bit at her inner lip. In the long-suppressed, non-pragmatic, romantic, dreamy, girly places deep inside her it mattered more than she would ever admit.

  ‘So what does Mr Gorgeous here do again?’ Kensey asked.

  Chelsea screwed up her nose and squinted at Kensey. ‘I think he’s some kind of telemarketer. For Keppler Jones and somebody.’

  Kensey only laughed all the more. ‘Did you pay any attention to how much our breakfast cost us today? He’s no telemarketer.’

  Kensey stood and bumped Chelsea aside with her hip. She leaned over the computer on the desk and typed his name and Keppler Jones into a search engine then clicked on the top listing. And up came a schmick website with all the latest Flash graphics. All creams and sky-blues and greys. Cool, sophisticated, and intimidating.

  ‘It’s a trading firm. Stocks and bonds and the like.’ Kensey’s nimble fingers skipped over the keys. ‘These places always have pictures of their staff. It’s a total male vanity, “look at me and just guess how much money I earn” thing. Now here we go. Search for Damien Halliburton.’

  His page loaded. And another photograph did indeed accompany a bio short on personal information but long on awards, successes, plaudits from financial magazines, big-name clients and other brokerage houses alike. Both girls sagged a little. He was just the kind of guy who made a woman go weak at the knees.

  ‘He’s really dreamy, Chels.’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ she admitted.

  ‘Looks fine in a suit.’

  ‘That he does.’

  ‘I’d bet anything he looks just as fine out of it too.’

  ‘And what a pity that you’ll never know.’

  ‘So you’re meeting at seven o’clock?’ Kensey asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Chelsea said, biting at a fingernail.

  ‘You’ll both be needing dinner about then. How about you casually slip into the conversation something like, “Here’s your phone, Damien. And, boy, am I famished? Aren’t you famished? Perhaps we could pop inside and unfamish together.” Then later, much later, call me. Please. If I don’t get a complete rundown on every second I’ll never forgive you.’

  Kensey kissed her on the cheek, then swanned out of the room. A crash and a bang somewhere else in the building snapped Chelsea completely back to real life. Time she got back to work.

  But first…She dialled the number of Amelie’s restaurant. It was the kind of place you had to book a month in advance, but she saw no harm in trying. Especially when she had a desk covered in samples of rose-scented doggie shampoos and bedazzled cat ponchos from which to choose a nice little sweetener for her new favourite cloakroom attendant.

  Three o’clock came around slowly. Damien knew as he’d checked his watch a dozen times since he’d found out exactly who had his phone.

  He’d probably made less money for his clients that day than he had for himself when his father had insisted he get a job flipping burgers to learn the true value of money, and a hard day’s work, during the holidays from his private boys’ high school.

  Because now he’d decided he was ready to handle some pleasure for pleasure’s sake he couldn’t think past her voice, her fingers running up and down those gold beads, her lips smiling softly, her crossing her legs and rocking her top foot up and down to some slow, seductive inner rhythm.
It was as though she was all he had room in his mind for.

  And the bold truth was he couldn’t wait until seven to get a fix.

  Needing privacy, especially from Caleb who had an even better radar for sexual tension than for making money, he took a walk into the executive bathroom, checked under the stalls, and, finding himself alone, slid Chelsea’s phone from his inside jacket pocket.

  Chelsea was in the blue room blow-drying a Persian when the mobile rang. She tugged it from her back pocket, flipped it open, shoved it to her ear and said, ‘Chelsea London.’

  ‘Hi,’ a by now all too familiar deep male voice said, and she almost dropped the hair-dryer.

  ‘Give me two seconds,’ she said, before throwing the phone to the metal bench. She turned off the dryer, put an almost dry Snookums back into her cage, washed her hands, straightened her back, looked in the mirrored wall and flicked a fleck of cat hair from her cheek before picking up the phone again.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, her voice breathier than usual.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Damien asked, the face and the voice merging to create a killer combination.

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  ‘So what are you doing?’

  Chelsea frowned. Suddenly she felt as if she were in the eighth grade talking to the boy she’d had a crush on who’d ended up only using her so he could copy off her Biology paper. Another dud to add to the list of men who’d left her disenchanted in the gender as a whole. ‘Damien?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was there something in particular you were after?’

  Something about his pause had her holding her breath. The sounds of traffic from nearby Brunswick Street permeated the silence. Until he blew out a fast shot of breath and said, ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, just managing to make it over to the sunny window-seat to sit with one leg tucked beneath her. Better that than be upstanding when her knees gave way. ‘What were you thinking exactly?’

  She could have sworn his voice dropped an octave when he said, ‘I was wondering what it is you do for a living.’

  And just like that her blood returned to her extremities. He wasn’t thinking about her as she’d been thinking about him. He was bored. She flicked herself in the side of the head.

  ‘My friend Caleb has a theory that you are in fact a vendor of adult products. I just wanted to set him straight. Or not, if that’s the case.’

  Chelsea blinked. ‘Your friend thought…?’

  ‘He did. He has some imagination, my friend.’

  Well, what do you know? she thought. Mr Perfect was nothing at all out of the ordinary. He was just a guy after all.

  ‘Is your friend in the room with you?’ she asked, her voice now in total control.

  ‘Not at the moment, no.’

  ‘Well, you can tell him that there is a great way to waste your own time rather than other people’s. So why don’t you go right ahead and search for me on the Internet.’

  And at that she hung up. She threw the phone onto the window-seat where it bounced and settled like a glaring shiny beacon of collective disappointment.

  She poked her tongue out at the phone and shot to her feet. But it began to vibrate again. She knew it was him. But she wasn’t all that sure what to do with him. Beautiful him. Contradictory him. He was either funny or a jerk. And she wasn’t sure which she preferred him to be. Which would give her the chance at a better day’s work. A better night’s sleep.

  With a muffled oath she stormed over and snapped it open. ‘Would you prefer I told you to bite me? In case you missed the nuances in my voice that’s pretty much what I was trying to say.’

  ‘Chelsea, forgive me,’ he said, his voice contrite, and, oh, so deep and delicious she wanted to forgive him. ‘It was my attempt at finding a believable reason to call.’

  ‘Why?’

  And then he said the only words he could have to redeem himself. ‘Because you’re the girl who fell into my arms, and spilled my coffee, and stole my phone and gatecrashed my thoughts until I had to admit to her that I’ve been seriously thinking that a two-minute phone swap isn’t what we ought to be doing tonight.’

  This time her knees really did give way and she sank back to the window-seat and tucked her spare hand between her knees to stop it from trembling. So much for Damien Halliburton being a mere male clone. She’d never had a man tell her she was the girl before.

  She closed her eyes shut tight as she said, ‘You could have knocked me sideways with a feather when I realised it was you who had my phone too.’

  The second the words were out of her mouth she wished she could take them back. She suddenly felt as though the walls around her had been stripped away until she was sitting out in the cold alone. Naked. Unprotected.

  She pressed her toes into her shoes, and her shoes into the concrete floor, trying to ground herself. Gambling on a successful business she owned lock, stock and barrel was quite different from gambling with her tender emotions. ‘Damien, I—’

  He cut her off as though he’d sensed her backtracking. ‘So have dinner with me tonight. At Amelie’s. I’ve booked us a table. We can swap phones. Eat. And see where the night takes us from there.’

  She opened her eyes, was hit with a burst of bright sunshine from outside. Though the sun hit the cold glass so that she could barely feel its warmth.

  Dinner. A date. With the most beautiful man she’d ever met. ‘Sure,’ she said, wondering where the word even came from. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Excellent. So long as you don’t mind if we make it a little later. How’s nine o’clock?’

  ‘Nine would be fine,’ she said, infinitely glad she’d have time to change…either her outfit or her mind. ‘Better even. I feel like everything has taken twice as long as normal to be achieved today.’

  ‘All because I have your phone, I suppose,’ he suggested, though by the smile in his voice she was sure he knew that wasn’t even half the reason. He probably ruined women’s concentration spans constantly.

  ‘Of course,’ she said smoothly. ‘It’s all about the phone. So don’t forget to bring it at nine.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, his voice a deep hum that tickled across the back of her neck as certainly as if it were his fingers brushing away her hair. She imagined his lips following. The brief brush of his tongue along the delicate patch of skin…‘And there I was thinking you had some kind of love affair going on with that phone of yours and wanted it back yesterday.’

  ‘I do. I did. I…’ She flicked herself again. ‘I’ll see you at nine, Damien.’

  ‘Until then,’ he said, and hung up.

  Until then, Chelsea thought, slowly shutting the phone.

  She stood and found her reflection in the shiny steel industrial-sized sink in which they washed the cats and miniature dogs and pictured Damien standing behind her, all dark good looks and effortless polish.

  She sucked in her stomach and pursed her lips. If you could see past the flat chest and boyish hips, and her slightly crossed front teeth, which had never seen the back end of a pair of braces, her hair was long, her nose passable, and her eyelashes incongruously dark and never in need of mascara.

  She let her breath go and slumped into a more normal posture, and her dirt-smudged T-shirt, the third of the day, turned wrinkled and sloppy.

  She picked up the closest landline to ring and cancel the seven o’clock table she’d booked, and made a mental note to organise another set of samples for skinny Carrie to keep her mouth shut that the booking had ever existed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BY SEVEN, Damien’s employees had all gone home to their wives, husbands and assorted pets while Caleb had a date with an apparently very bendy Cirque de Soleil performer, leaving Damien alone in his big office with only the high winds buffeting his double-glazed window to keep him company.

  He checked his watch. Two hours until he was due to meet Chelsea.

  He flipped open her phone, pressed the exact right button
s to find her picture and stared at it. Her face half in shadow, half in too-bright light. A shy smile curved her mouth, silky hair tumbled over her shoulders, her pale slender neck seemed to go on for ever.

  He ran his thumb back and forth over the image.

  She seemed the kind of woman who’d enjoy curling up on a soft, cosy couch on a rainy day, legs tucked beneath a blanket, her head resting on a man’s lap, half-empty cups of hot chocolate leaving twin mug rings on the coffee-table while they watched a run of old movies.

  He flipped the phone shut with a satisfying snap.

  That life would never be his. He was a Halliburton, which meant working, living and playing hard. He hadn’t spent a day of his life curled up anywhere and he’d never craved hot chocolate.

  As he’d blithely walked out her door Bonnie had blamed his parents’ divorce for making him as commitment-phobic as he was. He thought it more likely his parents’ subsequent friendship without the marriage part getting in the way had more to do with his unwillingness to settle down. Though they had agreed that the sooner he was honest about what exactly he did want from any woman who came into his midst, the world would be a safer place. So what the hell was he doing asking a woman like that on a date?

  Could it be because he hadn’t forgotten the chemical reaction that had lit those golden eyes when she’d first looked into his? The instant surge of attraction. And just like that the image of her on the soft homey couch changed to include a shift of her lithe body, a lifting of her chin as she kissed him, and melted against him, as he spent hours so devoured by her he could no longer remember any other woman he’d ever met.

  He ran a hand fast over his face, over his tired eyes, and hard through his hair. So what did he want?

  For the rest of his life? He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to answer that question.

  But for now, for tonight, he wanted Chelsea. More than he remembered wanting anything in a long time. And until he had a bed of his own, he’d settle for having her wherever he could get her.

  It was around a quarter past seven by the time Chelsea made it home.