Ally Blake - How To Marry A Billionaire

She finished her statement with a deep intake of breath. Now she was certain of it. The way he was watching her, weighing her words so carefully—this guy had ulterior motive written all over him. He smiled easily enough, and his body language certainly showed that he was open to anything she had to offer. Any conversation topic, she thought, giving herself a mental slap. But if for some reason he wanted this all to go away, she was pretty sure he would have his way. And it made her so nervous her chest hurt.

It sure didn’t help her nerves that he continued to be just as unreservedly attractive as he was when she first laid eyes on him. It would have been more helpful for her jitters if he slouched, or fixed his hair an inordinate number of times, or if he professed a predilection for polka music.

She took a sip of water to stem the urge to babble and her mind whizzed back, hoping desperately she had not said anything idiotic or anything she shouldn’t have. She was pretty sure she had done well. ‘That’s all I’m prepared to tell,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

He shrugged. A movement so slight she didn’t know if he’d really shrugged at all or if she’d just caught his essential indifference.

‘OK, then, back to the reason why we’re here,’ Cara said, deciding it was about time she took control of the conversation if she was to get anything useful out of him. ‘Tell me about Chris.’

‘What would you like to know?’ Adam asked.

‘What does he look like, for starters?’ Though Adam was recognisable to her, she could not have picked the other owners of Revolution Wireless out of a line-up if her job depended on it.

Adam blinked. She had already pegged the fact that he did that when he was biding his time. Cara bit her bottom lip. Time-biding was not on her list of most favourite things.

‘Does he look anything like you, for instance?’

‘In some ways, yes. In other ways not at all.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘And what does he do for fun?’

This time the blink was different. It was loaded with thought. But she knew not what about.

‘He creates telecommunications innovations,’ Adam finally said.

Her lip-biting increased to a calorie-burning rate.

‘OK. So how do you two know each other? Just from work? What rings his bells? What sort of woman do you think he is trying to land?’

Give me anything, please!

‘We know each other from school.’

She waited for more but…nothing came.

‘Fantastic,’ she said, her patience finally running down. Sure, she had the job, but the last thing she needed was for it to work out so badly that she never worked again. Even with a mortgage paid off, a girl had city council rates and amenities to keep her working ad infinitum. And this guy had nothing to offer her but a bit of a crush.

‘Well, that’s all I needed,’ she said, refolding her napkin and making ready to leave. ‘Now I know he looks exactly yet nothing like you, he invents stuff for a living and he once went to school, I’m all set. With those specifics in mind I can now make sure he doesn’t look like a complete dud for the millions of people who will watch him eagle-eyed every week.’

‘Wait,’ Adam said, his hand landing atop hers.

Cara let out a nervous breath, seriously glad her bluff had worked. She sat down slowly and shot him her best blasé expression, but she knew already she was up against a professional in that department.

This time she waited for him to talk. If she was sitting with the best she might as well learn from him. And after a few seconds of duelling silence she realised that his hand was still atop hers.

Her gaze flittered down. His hand captured her attention once again. It was big and broad and tanned, especially lying on top of her own, which was small and pale. As she stared the silence changed. It became thick and noisy with unuttered complications.

Slowly she slipped her hand away and he didn’t stop her. She bit her lip to bring herself back to the present, then looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Adam, please tell me about your friend so I can make this as easy for him as I can.’

Adam had been ready to convince the girl to have Chris decked out with spats and a walking stick if that was what it would take to have his friend give up the game. But with her looking at him like that, beseeching, pleading, he found himself wilting. He told himself it was only because she made a good point.

It was in her power to make Chris look like an idiot. And when she had asked what Chris did for fun, Adam had baulked because he knew that Chris did nothing. Chris had worked tirelessly for years to achieve their joint goal, and now he was simply asking for some ‘him’ time. Didn’t he deserve at least that much?

‘So you really don’t know what he looks like?’ Adam asked.

She shook her head, slowly, as though if she went any faster he would not be able to keep up. ‘Nope. Not a bit. I have no idea if he’s old, young, thin, fat, balding or has a glorious head of hair.’

It was fair enough that she didn’t. Come to think of it, he was the only one who seemed to end up in any of those other types of magazines, the ones that the guys at work liked to snip out and stick on the corkboard in the kitchenette.

Cara blinked at him, her lashes sweeping down onto her cheeks in a look that spoke of pure and simple time-biding. And it took him a second to recover. He had to remind himself of the good-head-behind-the-pretty-face theory he had stumbled onto earlier.

Adam shifted in his seat, unused to being on the receiving end of his own tricks. This woman was a quick learner and he knew then and there he would have to stay on his toes. If this was to go smoothly for Chris, and thus work out to Revolution Wireless’s best advantage, he would have to keep a close eye on this one.

‘OK, then,’ Adam began, ‘first things first, Chris ain’t anywhere near brazen, so wipe that idea out right now. Picture a man…’

Cara leant forward, resting her chin on the heel of her palms as the guy across the table gave a rundown of the life and times of Chris Geyer. Stories of childhood antics, of bad dates, of a love of education, of a twenty-year friendship ran thick and fast. Cara listened with half an ear, smiling in all the right places, building up the idea of a friendly teddy-bear type whom she was more and more looking forward to meeting.

But the other half of her mind was focussed on the man telling the story. All efforts at nonchalance put aside, he became a charismatic, vibrant story-teller. Her nerves dissolved with every captivating word and she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

She could tell that he usually hid behind his laconic attitude so that he could measure the world without it measuring him. But behind the attitude lurked the guy who ran one of the most successful marketing campaigns the country had ever seen. This was the guy who could sell cookies to Girl Guides, he was just that compelling.

As she often did when she met new people, Cara pictured how she would light him. If ever, one day, she had the chance to do so, it would be all about shadows, taking advantage of those fantastic cheekbones and that straight nose. She would brush his hair back a tad further, knowing that he would only curl up more inside himself and make himself that much more intriguing. The carefully constructed remoteness, the seriously attractive mystery, the gorgeous depths of those navy-blue eyes…

‘Don’t you need to take any notes?’ Adam asked, his hands stopping mid-demonstration of how a mobile phone was built.

Cara snapped back to the present with such a jolt, her elbow slipped off the table and she had to catch herself before her chin followed in its wake.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked, lifting from his seat, reaching for her, his expression bright with surprise.