Ally Blake - How To Marry A Billionaire

She crossed her legs one way but the shoes were still hidden, so she crossed them the other way instead.

She hadn’t even heard Jeff return so as she swung her right leg over her left she connected fully with the poor guy’s upper thigh. His coffee-cup did a triple back somersault over his desk, trailing steaming milky coffee over everything in its path. The accompanying ‘Oof’ that sprang from Jeff’s mouth told her that the connection had not been a light one. She leapt to her feet, disentangling herself as she went.

‘Jeff, I am so sorry! Here, sit down, please.’

She manoeuvred Jeff into her chair, then reached over to place his tilted empty cup upright, as though it made any difference.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked, her attention zeroing in on the guy who held her financial stability in his hands. Hands which were currently stuffed between his legs.

‘Did I hurt you a great deal? What can I do to help?’

He took a few moments to gather his breath before he finally said, ‘When can you start?’

‘Start what?’ she asked, suddenly worried what she might be called upon to do to help.

‘The job. The gig. The show.’

‘I’m hired?’ Cara asked, her squeaky voice showcasing her scepticism.

‘That you are,’ Jeff promised, his breathing returning to normal.

‘Don’t you want to see my portfolio?’

‘No need. We’ve seen what you can do and you come highly recommended by those who’ve worked with you, including Maya Rampling of Fresh magazine, who seems to think you are, and I quote, “a gift from the heavens”, and whose help we will certainly need for marketing the show later on. And that’s enough for us.’

Cara spun about on the spot but had to right herself against the table when her dainty shoes threatened to give way beneath her.

‘So, are you ours for the having?’

‘I am all yours, Jeff. You can have me now.’

The young guy glanced up at her with the beginnings of a smile on his face. Cara snapped her mouth shut and waited for the perfectly reasonable response to her unfortunate phrasing, but instead his kind glance hit the floor once more. He shook his head.

‘Those are some shoes you’re wearing there, Ms Marlowe. And it pains me to imagine what they might have done to me had we not given you the job.’

‘ADAM TYLER, right?’ a husky voice called from behind Adam.

Adam turned to find the lovely lady he had met half an hour before. He blinked. It was a delaying tactic. It gave him a moment to size up the opposition or the problem before he spoke. But whereas before the woman was all elegant nerves, now she was all big smiles and gorgeous dimples. And those were qualities in a woman that he had never seen as a problem.

‘That’s right,’ he said, many years of practice masking everything but nonchalance in his laconic voice.

‘Well, now, you see I got the job.’ She gave him a little curtsy before continuing. ‘And I was told that you were the man I needed to see.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘To get the dirt on our man of the hour.’

He stood up straight, his hands clasped behind his back, and watched as she shifted from one foot to the other, all but dancing on those high red shoes of hers. Then all of a sudden she stopped fidgeting, piercing him with a stare so sharp he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even blink. He just stood there and waited for the acute green gaze to give him a reprieve.

‘Adam Tyler,’ she repeated, her bright eyes flashing as the unexpectedly sharp mind behind them whirred to life. ‘Head of Marketing for Revolution Wireless?’

He watched her carefully as the cogs and wheels clicked in her mind. Revolution Wireless. Billionaire. Chris. She would have the whole deal figured out in no time. So much for them recruiting ignoramuses.

It slammed into his mind that nobody was meant to know anything about Chris. That was the whole point, the beauty of the idea, that Chris would be an unknown, just a guy meeting a girl. But suddenly that was all disintegrating before him.

And disintegration was just what Adam wanted.

Her gaze drifted away from him as, like a good girl, she put two and two together. ‘Chris Geyer. The name was familiar but I couldn’t place it before. He’s one of your partners, right?’

He decided to keep his mouth shut. Maybe the fates had put her here just for him. Maybe he didn’t need to convince Chris. She could be the spanner in the works all on her own.

‘So it’s not a joke,’ she said. ‘The Billionaire Bachelor is not some hook to get a bunch of poor girls all excited only to have the fake Persian rug whipped out from under them. The Billionaire Bachelor is the real deal.’

Adam cringed on the inside. If that was to be the title of the show, Chris was dead meat.

But instead of venting his infuriation with internal screams behind closed eyes, Adam paid close attention to the woman before him, anticipating the inevitable moment when those eyes of hers would skitter back his way, lit all the brighter by the glitter of dollar signs. He braced himself, willing her to get it over with. Willing her to show herself as nothing special, as one of the countless many.

Her glance landed upon him, their eyes clashed, and he took in a short anticipatory breath as he looked for the sly smile that would no doubt touch at the corner of that luscious mouth. The tension inside him grew by the second as he waited for her to feed his disenchantment with womankind.

But the moment never came. Instead of a sly smile, there was a furrowed brow and what he guessed were teeth biting at her inner cheek. She wasn’t looking at him as the answer to all her hopes and dreams, she was looking at him as though she felt sorry for him. And where he had been prepared to be disenchanted, instead he was stunned.

She finally collected herself and smiled, but her expression was infinitesimally cooler than when she had first burst from the inner room, all coltish legs and curtsies.

‘So, anyway,’ she said, her tone pleasant but no longer perky, almost as though she preferred to pretend the past two minutes hadn’t existed. ‘I have been told that the TV station has an account at a lovely little bistro around the corner and I was hoping that I could take you there for lunch.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said, gathering his wits after being befuddled by her strange response, ‘but I don’t think that’s in the rules of the game.’

Her confusion was evident. She took in a short breath as though ready to question his comment, before she obviously figured it out for herself, her eyes brightening again with the realisation.

‘Please! I am not a contestant! The last thing I want or need is some brazen, bawdy billionaire breathing down my neck. Funny, though. You’re the second man today to think that. What is it about me that screams bikinis and hot tubs, I wonder?’ She said it more to herself than to him, but he still took a brief moment to consider the image.

Her conservative outfit did little to hide the long, lean curves and those unbelievable red shoes did things to her legs and her posture that made his mind turn easily to bikinis and hot tubs.

She moved over to the couch and sat down, patting the seat beside her, beckoning him to join her.

If she wasn’t a possible love interest for Chris, then who was she? His interest stirred, he did as he was told, sidling over and sitting beside her, one leg hooking up to cross on top of the other and his arms reaching out to lie across the back of the long leather couch.

‘I should have done this better,’ she said, holding out a slim ringless hand. ‘I’m Cara Marlowe.’

He shook her hand, taking a moment to enjoy the crisp, cool contact. But he waited for her to talk. He found that another good tactic. Most people could not leave silence well alone and they were more likely to fill it with interesting information than if they were questioned directly.